CHAPTER XVI
THE EFFECTS OF REALISM
All that was thinkable had taken image-shape: conception had become almost entirely dependent on imagination. Now, a too systematic idealism (this is what realism meant in the Middle Ages) gives a certain rigidity to the conception of the world. Ideas, being conceived as entities and of importance only by virtue of their relation with the Absolute, easily range themselves as so many fixed stars on the firmament of thought. Once defined, they only lend themselves to classification, subdivision and distinction according to purely deductive norms. Apart from the rules of logic, there is never a corrective at hand to indicate a mistake in the classification, and this causes the mind to be deluded as to the value of its own operations and the certainty of the system.
If the medieval mind wants to know the nature or the reason of a thing, it neither looks into it, to analyse its structure, nor behind it, to inquire into its origin, but looks up to heaven, where it shines as an idea. Whether the question involved is political, social or moral, the first step taken is always to reduce it to its universal principle. Even quite trifling and ordinary things are regarded in this light. Thus a point is debated in the University of Paris: May examination fees be levied for intermediate degrees? The chancellor thinks so; Pierre d'Ailly intervenes to defend the opposite view. Now, he does not start from arguments based on law or tradition, but from an application of the text: Radix omnium malorum cupiditas,[1] and so he sets himself to prove by an entirely scholastic exposition that the aforesaid exaction is simoniacal, heretical, and contrary to natural and divine law. This is what so often disappoints and wearies us moderns in reading medieval demonstrations: they are directed heavenwards, and lose themselves from the very start in moral generalities and Scriptural cases.
This profound and systematic idealism betrays itself everywhere. There is an ideal and clearly defined conception of every trade, dignity or estate, to which the individual who belongs to it has to conform as best he may. Denis the Carthusian, in a series of treatises, De vita et regimine episcoporum, archidiaconorum, etc., etc., pointed out to all—bishops, canons, priests, scholars, princes, nobles, knights, merchants, husbands, widows, girls, friars—the ideal form of their professional duties, and the way to sanctify their calling or condition by living up to that ideal. His exposition of moral precepts, however, remains abstract and general; he never brings us into contact with the realities of the occupations or walks in life of which he speaks.
This tendency to reduce all things to a general type has been considered a fundamental weakness in the mentality of the Middle Ages, owing to which the power to discern and describe individual traits was never attained. Starting from this premise, the well-known summary of the Renaissance as the coming of individualism would be justified. But at bottom this antithesis is inexact and misleading. Whatever the faculty of seeing specific traits may have been in the Middle Ages, it must be noted that men disregarded the individual qualities and fine distinctions of things, deliberately and of set purpose, in order always to bring them under some general principle. This mental tendency is a result of their profound idealism. People feel an imperious need of always and especially seeing the general sense, the connection with the absolute, the moral ideality, the ultimate significance of a thing. What is important is the impersonal. The mind is not in search of individual realities, but of models, examples, norms.
Every notion concerning the world or life had its fixed place in a vast hierarchic system of ideas, in which it is linked with ideas of a higher and more general order, on which it depends like a vassal on his lord. The proper business of the medieval mind is discrimination, displaying severally all concepts as if they were so many substantial things. Hence the faculty of detaching a conception from the ideal complex to which it belongs in order to regard it as a thing by itself. When Foulques de Toulouse is blamed for giving an alms to an Albigensian woman, he answers: "I do not give it to the heretic, but to the poor woman." Margaret of Scotland, queen of France, having kissed Alain Chartier, the poet, whom she found asleep, exculpates herself in these terms: "I did not kiss the man, but the precious mouth whence have issued and gone forth so many good words and virtuous sayings." It is the same turn of mind which, in the field of high theological speculation, in God between an antecedent will, desiring the salvation of all, and a consequent will, extending only to the elect.
Without the brake of empirical observation, the habit of always subordinating and subdividing becomes automatic and sterile, mere numbering, and nothing else. No subject lent itself better to it than the category of virtues and of sins. Every sin has its fixed number of causes, species, noxious effects. There are, according to Denis the Carthusian, twelve follies, deceiving the sinner; each of them is illustrated, fixed and represented by Scripture texts and by symbols, so that the whole argument displays itself like a church portal ornamented with sculptures. The enormity of sin should be considered from seven points of view: that of God, that of the sinner, of matter, of circumstances, of the intention, of the nature of the sin and of its consequences. Next, every one of these seven points is subdivided, in its turn, into eight, or into fourteen. There are six infirmities of the mind which incline us to sin, etc. This systematizing of morality has its striking analogies in the sacred books of Buddhism.
Now, this everlasting classification, this anatomy of sin, would be apt to weaken the consciousness of sin which it should enhance, if it were not attended with an effort of the imagination directed to the gravity of the fault and the horrors of the chastisements. All moral conceptions are exaggerated, overcharged to excess, because they are always placed in direct connection with divine majesty. In every sin, even the least, the universe is concerned. No human soul can be fully conscious of the enormity of sin. All the saints and the just, the celestial spheres, the elements, the lower creatures and inanimate objects, cry for vengeance on the sinner. Denis strives to over-stimulate the fear of sin and of hell by detailed descriptions and terrifying images. Dante has touched with beauty the darkness of hell: Farinata and Ugolino are heroic, and Lucifer is majestic. But this monk, devoid of all poetic grace, draws a picture of devouring torment and nothing more; his very dullness makes the horror of it. "Let us imagine," he says, "a white-hot oven, and in this oven a naked man, never to be released from such a torment. Does not the mere sight of it appear insupportable? How miserable this man would seem to us! Let us think how he would sprawl in the oven, how he would yell and roar: in short, how he would live, and what would be his agony and his sorrow when he understood that this unbearable punishment was never to end."
The horrible cold, the loathsome worms, the stench, hunger and thirst, the darkness, the chains, the unspeakable filth, the endless cries, the sight of the demons, Denis calls up all this before us like a nightmare. Still more oppressive is the insistence on psychic suffering: the mourning, the fear, the empty feeling of everlasting separation from God, the inexpressible hatred of God, the envy of the bliss of the elect; the confusion of all sorts of errors and delusions in the brain. And the thought that this is to last in all eternity is by ingenious comparisons wrought up to the fever-point of horror.
The treatise De quatuor hominum novissimis, from which these details are borrowed, was the customary reading during meal-time at the convent of Windesheim. A truly bitter condiment! But medieval man always preferred drastic treatment. He was like an invalid who has been treated too long with heroic medicines, only the most powerful stimulants produced an effect on him. In order to make some virtue shine in all its splendour, the Middle Ages present it in an exaggerated form, which a sedater moralist would perhaps regard as a caricature. Saint Giles praying God not to allow his wound caused by an arrow to heal is their pattern of patience. Temperance finds its models in saints who always mix ashes with their food, chastity in those who tested their virtue by sleeping beside a woman. If it is not some extravagant act, it is the extreme youth of the saint which marks him out as a model, Saint Nicholas refusing his mother’s milk on feast-days, or Saint Quiricus (a martyr, either three years or nine months old) refusing to be consoled by the prefect, and thrown into the abyss.
Here, again, it is the dominant idealism which makes people relish the excellence of virtue in an extra strong dose. Virtue is conceived as an idea; its beauty shines more brightly in the hyperbolic perfection of its essence than in the imperfect practice of everyday life.
Nothing shows better the primitive character of the hyper-idealist mentality, called realism in the Middle Ages, than the tendency to ascribe a sort of substantiality to abstract concepts. Though philosophic realism did never admit these materialist tendencies, and strove to avoid such consequences, it cannot be denied that medieval thought frequently yielded to the inclination to pass from pure idealism to a sort of magic idealism; in which the abstract tends to become concrete. Here the ties which bind the Middle Ages to a very remote cultural past are very clearly displayed.
It was about 1300 that the doctrine of the treasure of the works of supererogation of Christ and the saints took a fixed form. The idea itself of such a treasure, the common possession of all the faithful, in so far as they are members of the mystic body of Christ, which is the Church, was by that time very ancient. But the way in which it was applied, in the sense that the superabundant good works constitute an inexhaustible reserve, which the Church can dispose of by retail, does not appear before the thirteenth century. Alexandre de Halès was the first to use the word thesaurus in the technical sense, which it has kept ever since. The doctrine did not fail to excite resistance. In the end, however, it prevailed and was officially formulated in 1343 in the bull Unigenitus of Clement VI. There the treasure has altogether the form of a capital confided by Christ to Saint Peter, and still increasing every day. For, in proportion as men are more drawn to justice by the distribution of this treasure, the merits, of which it is composed, will go on accumulating.
The material conception of ethical categories made itself felt more with regard to sin than to virtue. The Church, it is true, has always explicitly taught that sin is not a thing or an entity. But how could it have prevented the error, when everything concurred to insinuate it into men’s minds? The primitive instinct which see sins as stuff which soils or corrupts, which one should, therefore, wash away, or destroy, was strengthened by the extreme systematizing of sin, by their figurative representation, and even by the penitentiary technique of the Church itself. In vain did Denis the Carthusian remind the people that it was but for the sake of comparison that he calls sin a fever, a cold and corrupted humour—popular thought undoubtedly lost sight of the restrictions of dogmatists. The terminology of the law, less anxious than theology as to doctrinal purity, did not hesitate, in England, to connect with felony the notion of a corruption of the blood: this is the realistic conception in its spontaneous form.
On one special point the dogma itself demanded this perfectly realist conception: that is to say, with regard to the blood of the Redeemer. The faithful are bound to conceive it as absolutely material. A drop of the precious blood, said Saint Bernard, would have sufficed to save the world, but it was shed abundantly, as Saint Thomas Aquinas expresses it in a hymn:
"Pie Pelicane, Jesu domine,
Me immundum munda tuo sanguine,
Cuius una stilla salvum facere
Totum mundum quit ab omni scelere."[2]