Mysteries of the Middle Ages

by Thomas Cahill

  How are we to follow such a path? The four gospels of the New Testament tell us how, for each recounts the story of Jesus’s earthly pilgrimage from a somewhat different personal angle—the angle of each writer—and in this story Jesus shows us the Way, the way to live our lives so that we may reach the same conclusion his life reached, eternal union with God. “No one has ever seen God,” states John’s Gospel, for, like Plotinus’s One, he-she-it is in himself-herself-itself unknowable. There is nothing you can assert positively about God (including gender) that is secure from falsehood. But, says Jesus conclusively in the same gospel, “If you know me, you will also come to know my Father. Henceforth you do know him—for you have seen him.” The face of the Father-God that we have seen is his ikon, his veritable image in flesh, Jesus.

  And what shall we say of this face of God turned toward us? Only that it is compassionate beyond all imagining, willing to live, suffer, and die for each of us, so compassionate that it excludes no one, not even the most stupid, the most craven, the most outrageous, the most corrupt. What must we do to follow the face of God? Jesus tells us in Matthew’s Gospel: “You must … include everyone, just as your heavenly Father includes everyone.” No one is negligible.g

  It would be arrogant to claim that Roman Christians understood this business better than Greek Christians. Both were working from the same gospels and the same basic creed. It is a question not of evangelical understanding or credal positions but of cultural emphasis, of almost gustatory preference. If Greeks preferred to contemplate the Trinity, Romans preferred to celebrate the Incarnation. If Greeks, more theologically precise, understood the Anastasis, the Day of Resurrection, to be the supreme Christian feast, Romans agreed in principle—but in practice they came to prefer Christmas, the feast of Christ’s birth, the supreme celebration of his humanity. In fact, the Romans invented Christmas. For the Greeks, the first celebration of Christ’s infancy was not Christmas Day but January 6, the Epiphania, or Showing Forth, the feast of the infant Jesus’s recognition by the Persian magi who seek him out in Matthew’s Gospel.

  There is a telling passage in the Roman Martyrology, the record kept by the Roman church to commemorate the acts of Christian martyrs (and, eventually, of other saints) and to ensure that their valorous deeds would never be forgotten. It is a curious, ramshackle collection, full of information and misinformation, fact, legend, and supposition, the work of many anonymous hands over many centuries, some contributors more scrupulous than others. It grew over time to voluminous proportions, and its thumbnail vitae sanctorum, its daily entries on the saints to be commemorated at mass the following day, were read aloud in monastic refectories during the evening meal.

  The most eloquent entry in the whole unwieldy collection is for the birth of Jesus, a summation of salvation history that presages the colorful tableaux of seminal scriptural moments that would one day shine from the many-paneled windows of stained glass in the great cathedrals of the high Middle Ages. Though some of the dating in the entry appears fanciful to us, it was based on the best calendrical calculations of late antiquity, both Hellenic and Hebraic. In his rolling cadences, the writer means to summon all the dignity of his pagan Latin inheritance; in his simplicity, he foreshadows the mystery plays, those tinseled, tumbledown scriptural pageants that guilds of workmen would one day perform in every town square; in his extravagant use of capital letters, he is already entering into the playful, childlike spirit of illuminated manuscripts. The entire entry consists of a single periodic sentence. As in all such sentences that have come down to us from classical antiquity, this one builds in a triumphant crescendo, like a chorus by Handel. Its most significant words are those that end its final three phrases:

  THE TWENTY-FIFTH DAY OF DECEMBER

  In the 5199th year since the creation of the world,

  when in the beginning God made heaven and earth;

  the 2957th year since the Flood;

  the 2015th year since the birth of Abraham;

  the 1510th year since Moses

  and the going forth of the People of Israel from Egypt;

  the 1032nd year since David’s royal anointing;

  in the 65th week, according to the Prophecy of Daniel;

  in the 194th Olympiad;

  the 752nd year from the Foundation of the City of Rome;

  the 42nd year of the Rule of Octavian Augustus, all the world

  being at peace,

  in the sixth age of the world,

  JESUS CHRIST,

  eternal God and Son of the eternal Father,

  desiring to sanctify the world by his most merciful coming,

  being conceived by the Holy Spirit,

  and nine months having passed since his conception,

  IN BETHLEHEM OF JUDA WAS BORN,

  OF THE VIRGIN MARY MADE MAN—

  the Birthday of our Lord Jesus Christ according to the flesh.

  He is born! He is human!h He is made of flesh and blood! Such concrete, happy, almost merry statements were to have more impact on the shaping of Western Christendom than all the airy musings of the Greeks. As the Eucharistic prayer of the Roman rite proclaims, this Jesus is “like us in all things,” adding only the necessary qualifier “but sin.” He is Emmanuel, God-with-us, God-for-us, God never distant, God on the side of humanity.

  To say these things with the sheer élan they inspired in Christians of the dawning Middle Ages is to find oneself very nearly singing a Christmas carol. “Tomorrow shall be my dancing day,” sings the Second Person of the Most Exalted Trinity in an English carol in which he contemplates his coming Incarnation, his “dancing day.” It is a song to be sung on Christmas Eve:

  Tomorrow shall be my dancing day:

  I would my true love did so chance

  To see the legend of my play,

  To call my true love to my dance:

  Sing O my love, O my love, my love, my love;

  This have I done for my true love.

  In a manger laid and wrapped I was,

  So very poor, this was my chance,

  Betwixt an ox and a silly poor ass,

  To call my true love to my dance.

  Sing O my love, O my love, my love, my love;

  This have I done for my true love.

  (Photo Credit itr.3)

  This text, in which the Dancer goes on to point to the major events of his life, death, and resurrection, is one in feeling with the Christmas Martyrology, the illuminated manuscripts, the stained glass, and the mystery plays. In such boldly unsubtle celebrations, one is seldom stumped by precious ambiguities or disoriented by educated profundities beyond the grasp of an illiterate commoner. The angels are always known by their wings, the saints by their halos. Christ always wears his bloodred robe; Mary is always cloaked in bright blue.i The God-Man finds his home on earth among the poor, the outcast, the forgotten—whether shepherds, prostitutes, or “an ox and a silly poor ass.” He and his parents are just a mite uncomfortable when three exotic kings arrive to pay homage. There is no shallow cleverness; what profundity there is rests only in the depths of humane meaning that the images can conjure up.

  In the last verse of “My Dancing Day,” the Dancer takes his largest leap:

  Then up to heaven I did ascend,

  Where now I dwell in sure substance

  On the right hand of God, that man

  May come unto the general dance.

  Sing O my love, O my love, my love, my love;

  This have I done for my true love.

  This is a love story in which Christ the Lover seeks out Mankind his Beloved in order to welcome human beings back into “the general dance,” the fantastic, if hidden, harmony of creation. In a searching theological exposition, such a thought might not appear simple, but here it is presented as if in a child’s picture book.

  It is impossible to date the text of “My Dancing Day.” We find it printed on many extant broadsides, one-page handouts from the early age of printing. There is, however, every reason t
o believe that the text originated in the later Middle Ages, perhaps in the fourteenth century. For one thing, the phrase “the legend of my play” appears to be an allusion to a mystery play; and it is likely that the song was written to be performed at the beginning or end of one of those plain people’s dramas. Its chorus has also suggested to many scholars that it was once a secular love song to a lady—one of the type that became popular throughout Western Europe in the twelfth century—later conjoined to the story of Jesus.

  It is no easier to date the Christmas Martyrology, except to say that its literary quality seems to place it in the very early Middle Ages, perhaps in the sixth century, when Latin texts still retained echoes of classical style. Taken together, this early Christmas proclamation and the late Christmas carol, however different from each other their use of language and flights of imagination, provide a frame for us. In each of the chapters to come, as we journey through the centuries that separate carol from proclamation, we shall encounter—in prayer and piety, architecture and art, legend and social ritual, theology and alchemy, science and poetry—the all-compassionate God-Man, the tenderhearted One-for-others.

  The fathers of the Eastern church would surely have found “My Dancing Day” heresy and hurled anthemas at it. Why, the cheek of pretending to get inside the unknowable mind of God, to characterize the psychology of the divine Logos! They themselves stuck unpoetically to far more abstract assertions, even if they did ask themselves why God was prompted to become man. Their answer assumed a Platonic-Plotinian scheme: our world is a world of corruption and decay, so corrupt and so very mortal that, despite the aspirations of the great philosophers, we could never reach incorruptible immortality unaided. The Logos came to our aid.

  Early Western theologians found this schematically arid. Sure, Jesus’s advent had saved us from eternal corruption; more important, he had saved us from our sins, our hopeless sins. Thus was introduced into theology—in large measure by the guilt-obsessed Augustine of Hippo, the greatest of the Western fathersj—the guilt we have never since been able to shed. Of course, it is possible to feel too guilty. We all know anxious souls whose upbringing impels them to second-guess their every action. But when we consider the actions that continue to render our world dysfunctional—whether the actions of the current Caesar or of the malicious family member—we know without question that if only these sinners were to heed their guilt, the world would be a far better place. And when we consider the rendings and regrets of our own life, we know in sadness that our sense of guilt is warranted. Guilt, as the psychotherapist Willard Gaylin has said, “is the guardian of our goodness.” Without it, we would lose “the sense of anguish that we have fallen short of our own best standards.” We would fall to the inhuman level of the sociopath. Guilt, in its articulation as the necessary concomitant to sin—as the “still, small voice” of conscience that forces even so monstrous a villain as Lady Macbeth to walk in her sleep and wash her hands—is one of the supreme gifts of the Judeo-Christian tradition to the Western world.

  It is meaningful to bear in mind that this “Western world,” which will one day be divided into “Catholic” and “Protestant,” was for many centuries a cultural unity that came—and this exceedingly slowly and by infinitesimal degrees—to exclude Eastern (or “Greek”) Christians, known to us as “Orthodox.” The “Catholic” Middle Ages belong as much to Protestants as to Catholics. Looking backwards now from a vantage point more than five hundred years beyond the first stirrings of reformation, our eyes can see more starkly the continuity of medieval and reformation sensibilities. Martin Luther, no less than any medieval saint, understood the tenderhearted drama and poured-out love of the Incarnation. He sang in notes that summon up both Christmas Martyrology and Christmas carol. “You are to look at this little baby in the crib,” said he, “and this poor man on the cross and say: This is God.” And he understood as well as the anonymous lyricist of “My Dancing Day” that this Incarnation implied the impoverishment of God for the sake of our enrichment.

  The great tragedy of Christian history is not the conversion of Constantine, followed by the corrupting union of church with state. From a religious point of view, there have surely been three greater tragedies: the alienation of Judaism from Christianity (and the subsequent and more horrendously consequential alienation of Christianity from Judaism); the gradual fracture of Christendom into warring “churches”; and the division of Christians into professionals and amateurs, clergy and “faithful.” To the last of these we now turn.

  Affirmations of Incarnation, with their mixture of many flavors—Greek intellectual distinctions, stripped-down instructions by plainspoken Roman catechists, warmly florid responses from ordinary believers—were hardly the only things happening in papal Italy in the early Middle Ages. Once the all-powerful emperor withdrew his saving presence to the Asian shore, the Italian peninsula experienced an unprecedented power vacuum. Would Italians continue to wait on the word of the faraway emperor, remaining his obedient if abandoned subjects? And what, by Christ, was to be done about the noxious barbarians, attempting to sneak over the Rhine in ever larger numbers, a looming and smelly threat to Pax Romana?

  The pope and his brother bishops, all public men in the classical mode, moved quickly and deftly to secure the peace of their increasingly fractured realms (and, in the process, to aggrandize themselves). By the early fifth century, the barbarian hordes were pouring into Italy from the north and east, attracted mightily by settled farmlands and sweet vineyards. By mid-century, one massive influx—the Huns under Attila—looked to march on Rome, now a defenseless former capital. Pope Leo the Great, a bishop of massive dignity, intelligence, and purpose, traveled north to Mantua and met with Attila. The pope used every trick he had—from eloquent words to elegant panoply to a tangible aura of spiritual authority—and so impressed the Hun that he agreed to desist. It was an encounter of mythological proportions and would bolster the reputation of Rome’s bishop for centuries to come. The pope could not be withstood, not even by an unbaptized savage.

  A century and a half after Leo, the battle against the barbarians was long lost. Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Huns, Vandals, Alans, and Sueves had overwhelmed the old order and were settling down everywhere in Italy, Spain, and north Africa—in all the old Latin-speaking territories. Gaul and Britain, once fiercely Celtic domains—and later Roman provinces—were being subdued by yet other Germanic insurgents, Gaul by Franks, Britain by Angles, Saxons, and Jutes.k Rome itself had been reduced to a depressed and defeated backwater, its ancient Senate gone, its enormous population shrunk to a tenth (and by the late sixth century a twentieth) of its former size, its marvelous water delivery system of ancient aqueducts in ruins from which water leaked into the plain, creating stagnant pools of disease. Even easy communication with the outside world was blocked—by Lombard barbarians, who had come in droves to inhabit the northern half of the Italian peninsula.

  Gregory the Great, scion of a noble Roman family, served as pope at the end of the sixth century and into the seventh. He lived in a monastery of his own foundation, built on his property, the Coelian Hill, most southerly of the seven hills of Rome. He was a serious monk and would have preferred to remain in monastic solitude, but he accepted his election and made the most of it. His fasts had left him with a weak constitution and a delicate stomach, for which the obvious remedy was typically Italian: his mother Sylvia’s specially prepared vegetarian dishes, which she sent him daily on a silver salver from her own home atop the Aventine Hill, a much better address than his.

  Such a familial detail gives us only a fraction of Gregory and his time. By his day, the sense of aristocratic entitlement was almost the only surviving remnant of classical tradition. Science and philosophy were lost beyond recovery, buried beneath legends of saints and miracles. Beyond the confines of a few monasteries and bishops’ palaces, literacy itself was in danger of extinction, so radically had the barbarian onslaught altered the Latin world. Gregory, himself a constant sc
ribbler, yet knew no language but Latin, though he’d spent many years at the Greek-speaking imperial court in Constantinople as the previous pope’s apocrisius (ambassador). His was an age not of academic accomplishment but of illiterate fear and fantasy. Will the barbarians attack today or tomorrow? Will the remaining urban population be wiped out entirely in the next wave of plague? Will Christ and his holy mother take pity on us? Let us fast for seven days and visit seven churches and pray before her seven images till our two knees are scraped raw.

  Gregory, whose imagination was credulously medieval, not skeptically classical, was still enough of a Roman to take with consummate seriousness his role as a public man and his duty to the commonweal. He was a champion letter writer, reminding the stewards of the far-flung papal estates that they must be vigilant over their charges, keep accurate accounts, and administer the bounty to God’s poor. “Promote not so much the worldly interests of the Church,” scratched one of his secretaries at his dictation, “as the relief of the needy in their distress.” He made certain that no resident of his city was starving; and anyone in need received abundant weekly gifts from the fruits of the episcopal farms. At his own table, still to be seen in a chapel on the Coelian Hill (as pretty and secluded today as it was in his time), he broke bread each afternoon with a dozen poor people, making sure they ate abundantly while he consumed a few spoonfuls of his mother’s broth of boiled vegetables.

  He sent a mission of his monks almost to the end of the earth—to the English compound of Canterbury—for the purpose of spreading the gospel among the Anglo-Saxons. The leader of the expedition was a monk named Augustine (not Augustine of Hippo but a timid librarian), who tried repeatedly to get out of his commission, since he had every expectation that the savages would eat him when he arrived. Once he landed and was accepted by the English, however, he found himself raised to the office of bishop and soon began to administer his diocese of Canterbury with rigid Romanitas. Gregory wrote one letter after another,l admonishing Augustine not to prefer Roman customs to English ones. “My brother, customs are not to be cherished for the sake of a place, but places are to be cherished for the sake of what is good about them.” There was no need, advised Gregory, the practical Roman, to tear down the pagan temples—just remove the idols and replace them with decent Christian images. Nor was there any need to outlaw the old festivals or the customs that accompanied them. Just baptize them a bit.