by Will Durant
I, who never lied to him, answered that I would rather have committed thirty mortal sins than be a leper. When the monks had departed he called me to him alone, and made me sit at his feet, and said: “How came you to say that?” … And I told him that I said it again. And he replied: “You spoke hastily and foolishly. For you should know that there is no leprosy so hideous as being in mortal sin.” … He asked me if I washed the feet of the poor on Holy Thursday. “Sire,” said I, “it would make me sick! The feet of these villeins will I not wash.” “In truth,” said the King, “that was ill said, for you should never disdain what God did for our teaching. So I pray you, for the love of God first, and then for love of me, that you accustom yourself to wash the feet of the poor.”2
Not all Lives of the Saints were as honest as this. The sense of history, and the intellectual conscience, were so poorly developed in medieval minds that the writers of these edifying narratives seem to have felt that much good and little harm could come if their readers accepted the accounts as true. Probably in most cases the authors received the spreading tales from others, and believed what they wrote. If we take the Lives of the Saints simply as stories we shall find them full of interest and charm. Consider how St. Christopher got his name. He was a giant of Canaan, eighteen feet tall. He entered the service of a king because he had heard that this was the most powerful man in the world. One day the king crossed himself at mention of the Devil; Christopher concluded that the Devil was more powerful than the king, and thereupon he entered the Devil’s service. But at sight of a cross on the roadside the Devil took flight; and Christopher, reasoning that Jesus must be stronger than Satan, dedicated himself to Christ. He found it hard to observe the Christian fasts, there was so much of him to feed, and his great tongue tripped over the simplest prayers. A saintly hermit placed him on the bank of a ford whose swift waters annually drowned many who tried to cross it; Christopher took the wayfarers on his back and carried them dry and safe to the other shore. One day he bore a child across the stream; he asked why it was so heavy, and the child replied that it carried the weight of the world; safely across, the child thanked him, said, “I am Jesus Christ,” and disappeared; and Christopher’s staff, which he had stuck in the sand, suddenly blossomed with flowers.3 And who was Britain’s St. George? Near Silenum, in Libya, a dragon annually received as food a living youth or maiden, chosen by lot, as the price of not poisoning the village with his breath. Once the lot fell to the virgin daughter of the king. When the fated day arrived she walked to the pond where the dragon stayed. There St. George saw her, and asked why she wept. “Young man,” she said, “I believe that you have a great and noble heart, but hasten to leave me.” He refused, and induced her to answer his question. “Fear nothing,” he told her, “for I will help you in the name of Jesus Christ.” At that moment the monster emerged from the water. George made the sign of the cross, recommended himself to Christ, charged, and plunged his lance into the beast. Then he bade the maiden throw her girdle around the neck of the wounded dragon; she did, and the beast, yielding like any gallant to so potent a charm, followed her docilely forever afterward. These and other pretty tales were gathered, about 1290, into a famous book by Iacopo de Voragine, Archbishop of Genoa; for each day in the year he told the story of its appointed saint; and he called his book Legenda sanctorum—Readings about the Saints. Iacopo’s collection became a favorite with medieval readers, who called it Legenda aurea, the Golden Legend. The Church counseled a certain suspension of belief in regard to some of these stories,4 but the people loved and accepted them all, and perhaps were not more deceived about life than the simple folk who absorb the popular fiction of our day.
The glory of medieval Latin was its verse. Much of it was poetry in form only, for all varieties of didactic material—history, legend, mathematics, logic, theology, medicine—were given rhythm and rhyme as mnemonic aids. And there were epics of small moment and great length, like Walter of Châtillon’s Alexandreis (1176), which seem to us now as dull as Paradise Lost. There were also poetical disputations—between body and soul, death and man, mercy and truth, rustic and cleric, man and woman, wine and water, wine and beer, rose and violet, the poor student and the well-fed priest, even between Helen and Ganymede as to the rival merits of heterosexual and homosexual love.5 Nothing human was alien to medieval poetry.
The classic reliance on vowel quantity as the measure of meter was abandoned from the fifth century onward, and medieval Latin verse, rising out of popular feeling rather than from learned art, achieved a new poetry based on accent, rhythm, and rhyme. Such forms had existed among the Romans before Greek meters came to them, and had clandestinely survived a thousand years of the classic style. Classic forms—hexameter, elegiac, Sapphic-remained throughout the Middle Ages, but the Latin world had tired of them; they seemed unattuned to the moods of piety, tenderness, delicacy, and prayer that Christianity had spread. Simpler rhythms came, short lines of iambic feet that could convey almost any emotion from the beating of the heart to the tread of soldiers marching on to war.
Whence rhyme came to Western Christendom no one knows and many guess. It had been used in a few pagan poems, as by Ennius, Cicero, Apuleius; occasionally in Hebrew and Syriac poetry; sporadically in Latin poetry of the fifth century; abundantly in Arabic verse as early as the sixth century. Possibly the Moslem passion for rhymes affected the Christians who touched Islam; the surfeit of rhymes, medial and terminal, in medieval Latin verse recalls a like excess in Arabic poetry. In any case the new forms begot an entire new corpus of Latin poetry, utterly unlike the classic types, astonishing in abundance, and of unsuspected excellence. Here, for example, is Peter Damian (1007–72), the ascetic reformer, likening the call of Christ to the call of a lover to a maid:
Quis est hic qui pulsat ad ostium?
noctis rumperis somnium?
Me vocat: “O virginum pulcherimma,
soror, coniux, gemma splendidissima.
Cito, surgens aperi, dulcissima.
Ego sum summi regis filius,
primus et novissimus;
qui de caelis in has veni tenebras,
liberare captivorum animas:
passus mortem et multas iniurias.”
Mox ego dereliqui lectulum,
cucurri ad pessulum:
ut dilecto tota domus pateat,
et mens mea plenissime videat
quern videre maxime desiderat.
At ille iam inde transierat;
ostium reliquerat.
Quid ergo, miserrima, quid facerem?
Lacrymando sum secuta iuvenem
manus cuius plasmaverunt hominem….
Who is this that knocks at my door?
Would you shatter my night’s dream?
He calls me: “O loveliest of maidens,
Sister, mate, gem most resplendent!
Quick! rise! open, most sweet!
I am the son of the highest king,
His first and youngest son,
Who from heaven has come to this
darkness
To free the souls of captives;
Death have I suffered, and many injuries.”
Quickly I left my couch,
Ran to the threshold,
That to the beloved all the house might
lie open,
And my soul might in fullest see
Him whom it most longs to see.
But he so soon had passed by,
Had left my door.
What then, miserable me, should I do?
Weeping I followed after the youth
Whose hands formed man.
To Peter Damian poetry was an incident; to Hildebert of Lavardin (1055?-1133), Archbishop of Tours, it was a passion that fought his faith for his soul. Probably from the Bérenger of Tours who had studied under Fulbert at Chartres he imbibed a love for the Latin classics. After many tribulations he journeyed to Rome, not sure which he sought more—papal benediction or a sight of the scenes endeared to him by his readi
ng. He was touched by the grandeur and decay of the old capital, and expressed his feelings in classic elegiac form:
Par tibi, Roma, nihil, cum sis prope tota ruina;
quam magni fueris integra fracta doces.
Longa tuos fastus aetas destruxit, et arces
Caesaris et superum templa palude iacent.
Ille labor, labor ille ruit quern dirus Araxes
et stantem tremuit et cecidisse dolet….
Non tamen annorum series, non flamma, nec ensis
ad plenum potuit hoc abolere decus.*
Here for a moment a medieval poet used the Latin language as nobly as Virgil himself. But once a Christian, always a Christian. Hildebert found more comfort in Jesus and Mary than in Jupiter and Minerva; and in a later poem he impeccably dismissed the ancient shrines:
Gratior haec iactura mihi successibus illis;
maior sum pauper divite, stante iacens.
Plus aquilis vexilla crucis, plus Caesare Petrus,
plus cinctis ducibus vulgus inerme dedit.
Stans domui terras, infernum diruta pulso;
corpora stans, animas fracta iacensque rego.
Tunc miserae plebi, modo principibus tenebrarum
impero; tunc urbes, nunc mea regna polus.†
Not since Fortunatus had any Latin penned such poetry.
II. WINE, WOMAN, AND SONG
Our knowledge of the pagan or skeptical aspects of medieval life is naturally fragmentary; the past has not transmitted itself to us impartially, except in our blood. We must all the more admire the liberality of spirit—or the fellowship of enjoyment—that led the monastery of Benediktbeuern (in Upper Bavaria) to preserve the manuscript which reached print in 1847 as Carmina Burana (Beuern Poems), and is now our main source for the poetry of the “wandering scholars.”‡ These were not tramps; some were footloose monks straying from their monasteries, some were clerics out of a job, most were students en route, often by foot, between home and university, or from one university to another. Many students stopped at taverns on the way; some sampled wines and women, and learned unscheduled lore. Some composed songs, sang them, sold them; some abandoned hope of an ecclesiastical career, and lived from pen to mouth by dedicating their poetic powers to bishops or lords. They labored chiefly in France and western Germany, but as they wrote in Latin their poems achieved an international currency. They pretended to have an organization—the Ordo vagorum, or guild of wanderers; and they invented as its founder and patron saint a mythical Rabelaisian personage whom they called Golias. As early as the tenth century Archbishop Walter of Sens fulminated against the scandalous “family of Golias”; and as late as 1227 a Church council condemned the “Goliardi” for singing parodies on the most sacred songs of the liturgy.6 “They go about in public naked,” said the Council of Salzburg in 1281; “they lie in bake ovens, frequent taverns, games, harlots, earn their bread by their vices, and cling with obstinacy to their sect.”7
We know only a few of these Goliardic poets individually. One was Hugh or Hugo Primas, a canon at Orléans about 1140, “a vile fellow, deformed of visage,” says a rival scribe,8 but famed “through many provinces” for his ready wit and verse; dying of unbought poetry, and flinging angry satires at the ecclesiastical rich; a man of great erudition and little shame, writing coarse indecencies in hexameters almost as chaste as Hildebert’s. Still more renowned was one whose name is lost, but whom his admirers called Archipoeta, the Archpoet (c. 1161), a German knight who preferred wine and ink to sword and blood, and lived fitfully on the occasional charity of Rainald von Dassel, archbishop-elect of Cologne and ambassador of Barbarossa at Pavia. Rainald tried to reform him, but the poet begged off with one of the most famous of medieval poems—the “Confession of Goliath”—whose final stanza became a favorite drinking song in German universities.
1. Seething over inwardly
With fierce indignation,
In my bitterness of soul
Hear my declaration.
I am of one element,
Levity my matter,
Like enough a withered leaf
For the winds to scatter.
2. Never yet could I endure
Soberness and sadness.
Jests I love, and sweeter than
Honey find I gladness.
Whatsoever Venus bids
Is a joy excelling;
Never in an evil heart
Did she make her dwelling.
3. Down the broad way do I go,
Young and unregretting;
Wrap me in my vices up,
Virtue all forgetting.
Greedier for all delight
Than heaven to enter in,
Since the soul in me is dead,
Better save the skin.
4. Pardon pray you, good my lord,
Master of discretion,
But this death I die is sweet,
Most delicious poison.
Wounded to the quick am I
By a young girl’s beauty;
She’s beyond my touching? Well,
Can’t the mind do duty?
5. Sit you down amid the fire,
Will the fire not burn you?
Come to Pavia; will you
Just as chaste return you?
Pavia, where beauty draws
Youth with fingertips,
Youth entangled in her eyes,
Ravished with her lips.
6. Let you bring Hippolytus,
In Pavia dine him;
Never more Hippolytus
Will the morning find him.
In Pavia not a road
But leads to Venery,
Nor among its crowding towers
One to chastity.
7. Meum est propositum
in taberna mori,
ut sint vina proxima
morientis ori.
Tunc cantabunt laetius.
angelorum chori:
“Sit deus propitius
huic potatori!”
7. For on this my heart is set:
When the hour is nigh me,
Let me in the tavern die,
With a tankard by me,
While the angels, looking down,
Joyously sing o’er me:
Deus sit propitius
Huic potatori*9
The Carmina Burana range over all the themes of youth: spring, love, boasts of seductions achieved, delicate obscenities, tender lyrics of love unreturned, a student’s song counseling a moratorium on studies and a holiday with love (omittamus studia, dulce est desipere)…. In one song a girl interrupts a scholar’s labor with Quid tu facis, domine? Veni mecum ludere (“What are you doing, master? Come and play with me”); another sings the faithlessness of woman; another, the grief of the betrayed and forsaken lass whose horizontal growth brings down parental blows. Many chant the joys of drinking or gambling; some attack the wealth of the Church (“The Gospel According to the Silver Mark”); some parody the noblest hymns, like Thomas’ Lauda Sion; one is a Whitmanesque song of the open road.10 Many are doggerel, some are masterpieces of lyrical craftsmanship. Here is a lover’s idyl of ideal death:
When she recklessly
Gave herself wholly unto Love and me,
Beauty in heaven afar
Laughed from her joyous star.
Too great desire hath overwhelmed me;
My heart’s not great enough
For this huge joy that overmastered me,
What time my love Made in her arms another man of me,
And all the gathered honey of her lips
Drained in one yielded kiss.
Again, again I dream the freedom given
Of her soft breast;
And so am come, another god, to heaven
Among the rest;
Yea, and serene would govern gods and men
If I might find again
My hand upon her breast.11
Most of the love poetry in the Carmina is frankly sensual; there are moments of tendern
ess and grace, but they are brief preludes. We might have guessed that by the side of the hymns of the Church there would sooner or later be hymns to Venus; woman, the devoted supporter of religion, is the chief rival of the gods. The Church listened patiently enough to these chants of love and wine. But in 1281 a council decreed that any cleric (therefore any student) who composed or sang licentious or impious songs should lose his clerical rank and privileges. Such wandering students as thereafter remained loyal to Golias sank to the level of jongleurs, and fell out of literature into ribald doggerel. By 1250 the day of the goliards was over. But as they had inherited a pagan current running beneath the Christian centuries, so their mood and poetry secretly survived to enter the Renaissance.
Latin poetry itself almost died with the goliards. The thirteenth century turned the best minds to philosophy; the classics retreated to a minor place in the university curriculum; and the almost Augustan grace of Hildebert and John of Salisbury had no heirs. When the thirteenth century ended, and Dante chose Italian for his medium, the vernacular languages became literature. Even drama, child and servant of the Church, put off its Latin dress, and spoke the peoples’ tongues.
III. THE REBIRTH OF DRAMA
The classic drama had died before the Middle Ages began, for it had degenerated into mime and farce, and had been replaced by hippodrome spectacles. The plays of Seneca and Hroswitha were literary exercises, which apparently never reached the stage. Two lines of active continuity remained: the mimetic rituals of agricultural festivals, and the farces played by wandering minstrels and clowns in castle hall or village square.12
But in the Middle Ages, as in ancient Greece, the main fountainhead of drama was in religious liturgy. The Mass itself was a dramatic spectacle; the sanctuary was a sacred stage; the celebrants wore symbolic costumes; priest and acolytes engaged in dialogue; and the antiphonal responses of priest and choir, and of choir to choir, suggested precisely that same evolution of drama from dialogue that had generated the sacred Dionysian play. In the ceremonies of certain holydays the dramatic element was explicitly developed. At Christmas, in some religious rites of the eleventh century, men dressed as shepherds entered the church, were greeted with “glad tidings” by a choirboy “angel,” and worshiped a wax or plaster babe in a manger; from an eastern door three “kings” entered, and were guided to the manger by a star pulled along a wire.13 On the 28th of December certain churches represented the “slaughter of the innocents”: boy choristers marched up nave and aisles, fell as if murdered by Herod, rose, and walked up into the sanctuary as a symbol of mounting into heaven.14 On Good Friday many churches removed the crucifix from the altar, and carried it to a receptacle representing the Holy Sepulcher, from which on Easter morning it was solemnly restored to the altar in token of resurrection.15 As far back as 380 the story of Christ’s Passion had been written as a Euripidean drama by Gregory Nazianzen, Patriarch of Constantinople;16 and from that time to this the Passion Play has kept its hold upon Christian peoples. The first such play recorded as having been performed was presented at Siena about 1200; probably there had been many such representations long before.