The Age of Faith

by Will Durant

  At first all Masses were sung, and the congregation joined in the singing; from the fourth century onward the vocal participation of the worshipers declined, and “canonical choristers” provided the musical response to the celebrant’s chant.† The hymns sung in the various services of the Church are among the most moving products of medieval sentiment and art. The known history of the Latin hymn begins with Bishop Hilary of Poitiers (d. 367). Returning to Gaul from exile in Syria, he brought home some Greco-Oriental hymns, translated them into Latin, and composed some of his own; all of these are lost. Ambrose at Milan made a new beginning; eighteen survive of his sonorous hymns, whose restrained fervor so affected Augustine. The noble hymn of faith and thanksgiving, Te Deum laudamus, formerly ascribed to Ambrose, was probably written by the Romanian Bishop Nicetas of Remisiana toward the end of the fourth century. In later centuries the Latin hymns may have assumed a new delicacy of feeling and form under the influence of Moslem and Provençal love poetry.100 Some of the hymns (like some Arabic poems) verged on jingling doggerel, tipsy with excess of rhyme; but the better hymns of the medieval flowering—the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—developed a subtle turn of compact phrase, a melodiousness of frequent rhyme, a grace and tenderness of thought, that rank them with the greatest lyrics in literature.

  To the famous monastery of St. Victor, outside of Paris, there came about 1130 a Breton youth known to us only as Adam of St. Victor. He lived there in quiet content his remaining sixty years, imbibed the spirit of the famous mystics Hugo and Richard, and expressed it humbly, beautifully, and powerfully in hymns mostly designed as sequences for the Mass. A century after him a Franciscan monk, Jacopone da Todi (1228?-1306), composed the supreme medieval lyric, the Stabat Mater. Jacopone was a successful lawyer in Todi, near Perugia; his wife was renowned for both goodness and loveliness; she was crushed to death by the fall of a platform at a festival; Jacopone became insane with grief, roamed the Umbrian roads as a wild vagrant crying out his sins and sorrows; smeared himself with tar and feathers, and walked on all fours; joined the Franciscan tertiaries, and wrote the poem that sums up the tender piety of his time:

  Stabat mater dolorosa

  iuxta crucem lacrimosa,

  dum pendebat filius;

  cuius animan gementem

  contristantem et dolentem

  pertransivit gladius.

  O quam tristis et afflicta

  fuit illa benedicta

  mater unigeniti!

  Quae maerebat et dolebat,

  et tremebat, cum videbat

  nati poenas incliti.

  Quis est homo qui non fleret

  matrem Christi si videret

  in tanto supplicio?

  Quis not posset contristan,

  piam matrem contemplan,

  dolentem cum filio? …

  Stood the mother broken-hearted

  All in tears before the cross

  While her Son hung dying;

  Through her spirit heavy laden,

  Mourning for Him and in pain,

  Pierced a sword of grief.

  Oh, how sad and deep-afflicted

  Was that mother, all so blessed,

  Of the only Son!

  Wailed she then and sore lamented,

  Trembled when she saw the torture

  Of her noble Son.

  Who is he that would not sorrow

  If he saw our Saviour’s mother

  In such agony?

  Who could help but share her sadness,

  Seeing her, the loving mother,

  Grieving with her Son? …

  Eia, mater, fons amoris,

  me sentire vim doloris

  fac, ut tecum lugeam;

  fac ut ardeat cor meum

  in amando Christum deum

  ut sibi complaceam.

  Sancta mater, illud agas,

  crucifixi fige plagas

  cordi meo valide;

  tui nati vulnerati,

  tam dignati pro me pati,

  poenas mecum divide.

  Fac me vere tecum flere

  crucifixo condoleré,

  donec ego vixero.

  Iuxta crucem tecum stare,

  te libenter sociare

  in planctu desidero.

  Fac me cruce custodiri

  morte Christi praemuniri

  confoveri gratia;

  quando corpus morietur,

  fac ut animae donetur

  paradisi gloria.

  Come, my mother, fount of loving,

  Make me feel your fullest anguish,

  Let me mourn with you;

  Let my heart be fired with ardor

  Loving Christ our God and Saviour,

  Let me please Him so!

  Holy mother, do this for me:

  Plant the blows of Him so martyred

  Deeply in my heart;

  Of your offspring sorely wounded,

  Bearing ignominy for me,

  Let me share the pains!

  Let me truly weep beside you,

  Mourn with you the Crucified,

  All my living years.

  Standing by the cross together

  Would that I might e’er be with you,

  Gladly bound in grief.

  Let me by the cross be guarded,

  Saved by Christ’s redeeming Passion,

  Cherished by His grace;

  When my body shall have perished,

  Let my soul in heaven’s glory

  See Him face to face.

  Only two poems rival this among medieval Christian hymns. One is the Pange lingua that St. Thomas Aquinas composed for the Corpus Christi feast. The other is the terrible Dies irae, or “Day of Wrath,” written about 1250 by Thomas of Celano, and still sung in the Mass for the Dead; here the horror of the Last Judgment inspires a poem as dark and perfect as any of Dante’s tormented dreams.101

  To the moving ritual of her prayers, hymns, and Mass the Church added the imposing ceremonies and processions of religious festivals. In northern countries the Feast of the Nativity took over the pleasant rites wherewith the pagan Teutons had celebrated the victory of the sun, at the winter solstice, over the advancing night; hence the “Yule” logs that burned in German, North French, English, Scandinavian homes, and the Yule trees laden with gifts, and the merry feasting that tried strong stomachs till the Twelfth Night thereafter. There were countless other feasts or holydays—Epiphany, Circumcision, Palm Sunday, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost…. Such days—and only in less degree all Sundays—were exciting events in the life of medieval man. For Easter he confessed such of his sins as he cared to remember, bathed, cut his beard or hair, dressed in his best and most uncomfortable clothes, received God in the Eucharist, and felt more profoundly than ever the momentous Christian drama of which he was made a part. In many towns, on the last three days of Holy Week, the events of the Passion were represented in the churches by a religious play, with dialogue and plain chant; and several other occasions of the ecclesiastical year were signalized with such “mysteries.” About 1240 Juliana, prioress of a convent near Liége, reported to her village priest that a supernatural vision had urged upon her the need of honoring with a solemn festival the body of Christ as transubstantiated in the Eucharist; in 1262 Pope Urban IV sanctioned such a celebration, and entrusted to St. Thomas Aquinas the composition of an “office” for it—appropriate hymns and prayers; the philosopher acquitted himself wonderfully well in this assignment; and in 1311 the Feast of Corpus Christi was finally established and was celebrated on the first Thursday after Pentecost, with the most impressive procession of the Christian year. Such ceremonies drew immense crowds, and glorified numerous participants; they opened the way to the medieval secular drama; and they helped the pageantry of the guilds, the tournaments and knightly initiations, and the coronation of kings, to occupy with pious flurry and sublimating spectacle the occasional leisure of men not natively inclined to order and peace. The Church based her technique of moralization through faith not o
n arguments to reason but on appeals to the senses through drama, music, painting, sculpture, architecture, fiction, and poetry; and it must be confessed that such appeals to universal sensibilities are more successful—for evil as well as for good—than challenges to the changeful and individualistic intellect. Through such appeals the Church created medieval art.

  The culminating pageants were at the goals of pilgrimage. Medieval men and women went on pilgrimage to fulfill a penance or a vow, or to seek a miraculous cure, or to earn an indulgence, and doubtless, like modern tourists, to see strange lands and sights, and find adventure on the way as a relief from the routine of a narrow life. At the end of the thirteenth century there were some 10,000 sanctioned goals of Christian pilgrimage. The bravest pilgrims fared to distant Palestine, sometimes barefoot or clothed only in a shirt, and usually armed with cross, staff, and purse all given by a priest. In 1054 Bishop Liedbert of Cambrai led 3000 pilgrims to Jerusalem; in 1064 the archbishops of Cologne and Mainz, and the bishops of Speyer, Bamberg, and Utrecht started for Jerusalem with 10,000 Christians in their wake; 3000 of them perished on the way; only 2000 returned safely to their native lands. Other pilgrims crossed the Pyrenees, or risked themselves on the Atlantic, to visit the reputed bones of the apostle James at Compostela in Spain. In England pilgrims sought the tomb of St. Cuthbert at Durham, the grave of Edward the Confessor in Westminster, or that of St. Edmund at Bury, the church supposedly founded by Joseph of Arimathea at Glastonbury, and above all, the shrine of Thomas à Becket at Canterbury. France drew pilgrims to St. Martin’s at Tours, to Notre Dame at Chartres, Notre Dame at Le-Puy-en-Velay. Italy had the church and bones of St. Francis at Assisi, and the Santa Casa, or Holy House, at Loreto, which the pious believed to be the very dwelling in which Mary had lived with Jesus at Nazareth; when the Turks drove the last Crusader from Palestine this cottage was carried by angels through the air and deposited in Dalmatia (1291), then flown across the Adriatic to the Ancona woods (lauretum) from which the honored village took its name.

  Finally, all the roads of Christendom led pilgrims to Rome, to see the tombs of Peter and Paul, to earn indulgences by visiting the Stations or famous churches of the city, or to celebrate some jubilee, or joyous anniversary, in Christian history. In 1299 Pope Boniface VIII declared a jubilee for 1300, and offered a plenary indulgence to those who should come and worship in St. Peter’s in that year. It was estimated that on no day in those twelve months had Rome less than 200,000 strangers within her gates; and a total of 2,000,000 visitors, each with a modest offering, deposited such treasure before St. Peter’s tomb that two priests, with rakes in their hands, were kept busy night and day collecting the coins.102 Guidebooks taught the pilgrims by what roads to travel, and what points to visit at their goal or on the way. We may weakly imagine the exaltation of the tired and dusty pilgrims when at last they sighted the Eternal City, and burst into the Pilgrims’ Chorus of joy and praise:

  O Roma nobilis, orbis et domina,

  cunctarum urbium excellentissima,

  roseo martyrum sanguine rubea,

  albis et virginum liliis candida;

  salutem dicimus tibi per omnia;

  te benedicimus; salve per saecula!

  “O noble Rome, of all this world the queen, of all the cities the most excellent! O ruby red with martyrs’ rosy blood, yet white with lilies pure of virgin maids; we give thee salutation through all years; we bless thee; through all generations hail!”

  To these varied religious services the Church added social services. She taught the dignity of labor, and practiced it through the agriculture and industry of her monks. She sanctified the organization of labor in the guilds, and organized religious guilds to perform works of charity.103 Every church was a sanctuary with right of asylum in which hunted men might find some breathless refuge till the passions of their pursuers could yield to the processes of law; to drag men from such a sanctuary was a sacrilege entailing excommunication. The church or cathedral was the social as well as the religious center of the village or town. Sometimes the sacred precinct, or even the church itself, was used, with genial clerical consent, to store grain or hay or wine, to grind corn or brew beer.104 There most of the villagers had been baptized, there most of them would be buried. There the older folk would gather of a Sunday for gossip or discussion, and the young men and women to see and be seen. There the beggars assembled, and the alms of the Church were dispensed. There nearly all the art that the village knew was brought together to beautify the House of God; and the poverty of a thousand homes was brightened by the glory of that temple which the people had built with their coins and hands, and which they considered their own, their collective and spiritual home. In the church belfry the bells rang the hours of the day or the call to services and prayer; and the music of those bells was sweeter than any other except the hymns that bound voices and hearts into one, or warmed a cooling faith with the canticles of the Mass. From Novgorod to Cadiz, from Jerusalem to the Hebrides, steeples and spires raised themselves precariously into the sky because men cannot live without hope, and will not consent to die.

  V. CANON LAW

  Side by side with this complex and colorful liturgy there developed the even more complex body of ecclesiastical legislation that regulated the conduct and decisions of a Church governing a wider and more varied realm than any empire of the time. Canon law—the “law of the rule” of the Church —was a slow accretion of old religious customs, scriptural passages, opinions of the Fathers, laws of Rome or the barbarians, the decrees of Church councils, and the decisions and opinions of the popes. Some parts of the Justinian Code were adapted to govern the conduct of the clergy; other parts were recast to accord with the views of the Church on marriage, divorce, and wills. Collections of ecclesiastical legislation were made in the sixth and eighth centuries in the West, and periodically by Byzantine emperors in the East. The laws of the Roman Church received their definitive medieval formulation by Gratian about 1148.

  As a monk of Bologna, Gratian may have studied under Irnerius in the university there; certainly his digest shows a wide acquaintance with both Roman law and medieval philosophy. He called his book Concordia discordantium canonum—reconciliation of discordant regulations; later generations called it his Decretum. It drew into order and sequence the laws and customs, the conciliar and papal decrees, of the Church down to 1139 on her doctrine, ritual, organization, and administration, the maintenance of ecclesiastical property, the procedure and precedents of ecclesiastical courts, the regulation of monastic life, the contract of marriage, and the rules of bequest. The method of exposition may have stemmed from Abélard’s Sic et non, and had in turn some influence on Scholastic method after Gratian: it began with an authoritative proposition, quoted statements or precedents contradicting it, sought to resolve the contradiction, and added a commentary. Though the book was not accepted by the medieval Church as a final authority, it became, for the period it covered, the indispensable and almost sacred text. Gregory IX (1234), Boniface VIII (1294), and Clement V (1313) added supplements; these and some minor additions were published with Gratian’s Concordia in 1582 as Corpus iuris canonici, a body of canonical—Church-regulating—law comparable with the Corpus iuris civilis of Justinian.*

  Indeed, the field covered by canon law was larger than that covered by any contemporary civil code. It embraced not merely the structure, dogmas, and operation of the Church, but rules for dealing with non-Christians in Christian lands; procedure in the investigation and suppression of heresy; the organization of crusades; the laws of marriage, legitimacy, dower, adultery, divorce, wills, burial, widows, and orphans; laws of oath, perjury, sacrilege, blasphemy, simony, libel, usury, and just price; regulations for schools and universities; the Truce of God and other means of limiting war and organizing peace; the conduct of episcopal and papal courts; the use of excommunication, anathema, and interdict; the administration of ecclesiastical penalties; the relations between civil and ecclesiastical courts, between stat
e and Church. This vast body of legislation was held by the Church to be binding on all Christians, and she reserved the right to punish any infraction of it with a variety of physical or spiritual penalties, except that no ecclesiastical court was to pronounce a “judgment of blood”—i.e., condemn to capital punishment.

  Usually, before the Inquisition, the Church relied on spiritual terrors. Minor excommunication excluded a Christian from the sacraments and ritual of the Church; any priest could pronounce this penalty; and to believers it meant everlasting hell if death should reach the offender before absolution came. A major excommunication (the only kind now used by the Church) could be pronounced only by councils or by prelates higher than a priest, and only upon persons within their jurisdiction. It removed the victim from all legal or spiritual association with the Christian community: he could not sue or inherit or do any valid act in law, but he could be sued; and no Christian was to eat or talk with him on pain of minor excommunication. When King Robert of France was excommunicated (998) for marrying his cousin he was abandoned by all his courtiers and nearly all his servants; two domestics who remained threw into the fire the victuals left by him at his meals, lest they be contaminated by them. In extreme cases the Church added to excommunication anathema—a curse armed and detailed with all the careful pleonasm of legal phraseology. As a last resort the pope could lay an interdict upon any part of Christendom—i.e., suspend all or most religious services. A people feeling the need of the sacraments, and fearful of death supervening upon unforgiven sins, sooner or later compelled the excommunicated individual to make his peace with the Church. Such interdicts were laid upon France in 998, Germany in 1102, England in 1208, Rome itself in 1155.