Mysteries of the Middle Ages

by Thomas Cahill

  In the medieval world, the value of virginity was an unassailable assumption; or, more precisely, the unassailable assumption was the centrality of Jesus Christ who, because he took flesh in the womb of a virgin and remained himself virginal through the course of his brief life, had sanctified virginity, exalting it above all ancient precedents, and had given virgins a role that rendered them integral and necessary to society. The sacrificial virginity of exceptional religious figures, which made them more Christ-like than the rest of us, was offered to God on our behalf. Their renunciation of ordinary pleasures and expectable satisfactions gave them an aura of perfection: they were, in a sense, already living in the world beyond the veil, companions of angels and saints, standing, as Hildegard boldly put it, “in the unsullied purity of paradise, lovely and unwithering.” Such extraordinary connection to Heaven turned them into mediating intercessors on our behalf, human like us but not so distracted by earthly concerns, living consciously in the presence of God. The medieval cult of virginity may have been wrapped in the severe shadows of Platonic antimaterialism, but there was also something quite new about it.

  The ancient Greek-speaking world had been, for one thing, a world of argument and abstraction; the medieval Latin-speaking world became a world of image and imagination. As early as the late second century, images of the Virgin Mother with the Divine Child on her lap appeared in the Roman catacombs on rough arches high above the tombs of early Christians. In these quickly daubed, fading frescoes Mary may still be discerned, surrounded by other biblical figures, some in shallow relief:

  She turned up first in Rome,

  impressed upon a catacomb,

  a hieroglyph relief

  conceived by a martyred primitif.

  Madonna and Child of the late second century from the Roman Catacomb of Santa Priscilla. The figure to the left is a prophet, either Balaam or Isaiah, each of whom was thought to have prophesied that Christ would appear as a star or light. Above the Madonna’s head is a star to which the prophet is pointing. Despite the poor state of preservation, we can discern that the Madonna is seated, wears a short-sleeved tunic, and is tenderly bent toward the baby, offering her breast. (Photo Credit 1.11)

  Apse of Santa Maria in Trastevere. The mosaic of Christ and the Virgin, enthroned beneath the hand of God and flanked by saints, was made about 1140. The mosaics lower down between the windows illustrate the life of the Virgin Mary. They were made in the late thirteenth century by the extraordinary medieval artist Pietro Cavallini. (Photo Credit 1.12)

  For all we know, these are not the first Christian images of Mother and Child, only the first to survive. It is even possible that the worship of the Virgin Mary is as old as apostolic times. In any case, here, close to the very beginning of her Roman cult, the Virgin is shown as the Virgin of Christmas—as Mother, affectionate and nurturing. Her connection to the divine is a connection so ordinary, so quotidian, so human as to be almost bathetic. Like all mothers, she comforted the child in her arms, offered her breasts to his sucking lips, and wiped his little bum—actions repeated so often that they constituted the most visible and unremarkable work performed in the ancient world (or in ours, for that matter).

  This early exaltation of Mother and Child already demonstrates the innovative Christian sense of grace, no longer something reserved for the fortunate few—the emperors and their retinues—but broadcast everywhere, bestowed on everyone, “heaped up, pressed down, and overflowing,” even on one as lowly and negligible as a nursing mother. In the words of a famous Latin hymn, “God … is born from the guts of a girl.”j For even the most ordinary people in their most ordinary actions can serve as vessels of God’s grace. Though awarding them equal political status with society’s leaders would have been unthinkable, their value as persons was newly absolute, for, as even haughty Hildegard understands, “they are all loved by God.”

  The worship of this Virgin of Virgins culminates in Rome in the magnificent Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere, the earliest church dedicated exclusively to Mary (soon after Christianity’s legalization in the fourth century), on the site of a remembered miracle, the sudden eruption of a healing fountain of oil at the very moment—or so legend had it—that Jesus was born in Bethlehem. The shimmering twelfth-century mosaic apse of Santa Maria, ornamented with prophets, apostles, saints, and symbolic sheep, gives us at its very center the Throne of Mercy, on which are seated Christ and Mary, welcomed into Heaven after her death by her son, who had preceded her.

  Up to this moment, Western art had imitated all the staid solemnities of the Greeks, and it is often impossible for a layman to tell a Roman image from an Eastern ikon. Mary of Trastevere is adorned as a Byzantine empress, elaborately crowned, decked out in golden, bejeweled garments. The gravity of her expression is tempered somewhat by the rounded oval of her face, shown to us not starkly straight-on but in a three-quarters view, turning toward her son. But Jesus is patently Italian, not Greek. The set of his figure, though dignified, is easy, informal, radiating affection. His broad, naked feet are planted solidly on the floor in clear contrast to his mother’s dainty slippers. His happy face is close to cartoonish, contented, playful, amused, capriccioso, almost mouthing “Mamma”; and since this is a moment of sublime felicity, his right arm is extended across his mother’s back, his right hand tenderly cupping her shoulder.

  This tremendous movement—the Son of God hugging his earthly mother!—had never been seen before. Hildegard had dreamed of such a thing, calling Christ her “sweetest hugger,” but now a visual artist, we don’t know who, shows it spectacularly above a pontifical altar. Anatomically, kinetically, instinctively, this is an entirely novel moment in the history of sacred art and the beginning of a characteristically Italian contribution. By this single gesture, Western art is freed from its Eastern enchantment. The long tradition of representing spirit by superserious faces and two-dimensional, stick-figure human bodies, starved, denatured, aloof, and devoid of movement, is about to give way, as Western Europeans discover a new embodiment, a new earthiness, a new bounce—a new kind of Heaven.

  And if saints can hug, so can we.

  (Photo Credit 1.13)

  Europe, a smallish place (at least when compared to the earth’s other great landmasses) and hardly a continent at all (attached to great Asia and all but touching sun-baked Africa), has been washed by successive waves of migrants—Celts, Germans, Slavs, Vikings, Arabs, Turks, north Africans—each fresh migration contributing to its intricately interlocking puzzle pieces of small countries and peculiar customs. In the early tenth century, a band of Norwegian Vikings, led by a Dane called Hrolf the Ganger (“Rollo” in subsequent French literature), settled around Rouen in the lower Seine valley. In short order they carved out for themselves a sizable province, henceforth called Normandy—home of the Northmen, or Normans. These tall, straw-haired, cold-eyed, calculating warriors, more adept at battle than any of their neighbors, would soon extend their reach far beyond Normandy.

  The Normans would also do something few conquerors had done before them: wholeheartedly adopt the language and customs of their conquered territories. In France they became quintessentially French, in England English (though changing the language of the court from Anglo-Saxon to French and thus lending modern English its rich Franco-Latin vocabulary), in Ireland “more Irish than the Irish themselves.” Even before they’d firmly established their dominance over Atlantic Europe—under their talented champion Duke William the Bastard, known after the Norman invasion of England in 1066 as King William I the Conqueror—some Normans were turning their attention eastward. Robert Guiscard (the Crafty) gradually conquered much of Italy and based himself in Sicily, where he adopted the style of a Byzantine emperor. His son Bohemund, a leader of the First Crusade, subdued Antioch in 1098 and there their descendant, Roger II of Sicily, was crowned king in 1130. The Norman genius for organization forged unions from the most unlikely expressions of ethnic diversity—Anglo-Norman, Sicilo-Norman, Normano-Syrian—and e
verywhere, from the Holy Land to the British Isles, the turreted stone castles of the Normans still stand as their lasting memorials and the lofty towers of their petitioning cathedrals still reach toward the sky.k

  If their castles were functional fortresses, in their cathedrals they permitted their imaginations to run riot, for these great churches, the seats of their bishops, were wild experiments in balance, very nearly the art of juggling reconceived as architecture. No buildings before or since have ever defied gravity so bravely and so lastingly. Before the twelfth century, European ecclesiastical architecture was Romanesque, squat and solid, dark and gloomy. Despite its many discrete and innocent charms (such as the apse of Santa Maria in Trastevere), the Romanesque does not tend to lift one’s spirits on a rainy day. The new Norman building, however, partly inspired by the rediscovery of the amazing texts of Euclid, embodied aspiration—pointed arches and soaring spires, caught in the act of leaping to Heaven, their movement complemented by immense windows stretching upward, admitting dazzling pools of colored light that drifted through the church as the sun moved across the sky. Structural details, such as the ribbed vaulting, conveyed an inner delicacy or, in the case of the flying buttresses, an inner balletic exuberance, almost an interior merriment. The sculptural details were orchestral, with elongated saints and angels grouped like massed choristers and instrumentalists on ascending platforms. From various high crooks and corners, half-hidden demons, hilariously indecent, sniffed the air like beasts or drooled downward toward their human prey. It was a total rethinking of human-inhabited space, which was now to be shared with supernatural reality. In contrast to the multiple cosmic dimensions that flew above them, the worshipers at ground level (and even the hierophants who occupied the immense raised chancel) were barely three-dimensional.

  One day this astonishing architecture will be called “Gothic” (that is, barbaric)—a name that still sticks to it—by neoclassicists who in their exclusive love of Palladian building will look down on everything medieval. It will then take the medievalists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to restore the reputation of the Norman cathedrals. Of the many scholars, architects, and amateurs who set about this task, none was more eloquent or influential than Henry Adams, grandson of President John Quincy Adams and great-grandson of President John Adams, one of the founders of the American Republic. Henry, who taught at Harvard and can still lay claim to being our most distinguished practitioner of American history, found himself late in life drawn as by a mysterious force to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, especially to the Norman churches of France and most especially to Notre-Dame de Chartres, the most extraordinarily beautiful of dozens of beautiful French cathedrals of this period dedicated to Jesus’s mother. “Most persons of a deeply religious nature,” insisted Adams, “would tell you emphatically that nine churches out of ten actually were dead-born, after the thirteenth century.”

  Cathedral of Notre-Dame, rising above the town of Chartres and called by the art historian Emile Male “the mind of the Middle Ages manifest.” The nearer spire, in late Romanesque style, is a restored survival from an earlier cathedral begun in the early eleventh century, whereas the taller spire, in Flamboyant Gothic style, dates to the beginning of the sixteenth century. But the body of the cathedral was built in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries and contains the Virgin’s Veil, a celebrated relic. (Photo Credit 1.14)

  For Adams, the force behind the art was the Virgin Mary herself—

  the highest energy ever known to man, the creator of four-fifths of his noblest art, exercising vastly more attraction over the human mind than all the steam-engines and dynamos ever dreamed of … All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres.…Symbol or energy, the Virgin had acted as the greatest force the Western world ever felt, and had drawn man’s activities to herself more strongly than any other power, natural or supernatural, had ever done; the historian’s business was to follow the track of the energy.…

  Which is what we propose to do in this book. In following “the track of the energy,” we shall bear in mind at least some of Adams’s exclusions: that, for instance, “this energy [is] unknown to the American mind” and that the Virgin “was popularly supposed to have no very marked fancy for priests as such; she was a queen, a woman, and a mother, functions, all, which priests could not perform. Accordingly, she seems to have had little taste for mysteries of any sort, and even the symbols that seem most mysterious [those emblematic of Mary’s femininity and motherhood] were clear to every old peasant-woman in her church.” A mystery accessible to the humblest.

  Nor shall we be unmindful of the vivid descriptions of the construction of Chartres Cathedral as related in a contemporary document, a letter of Archbishop Hugo of Rouen quoted by Adams. “The faithful of our diocese,” wrote Hugo, have joined with others much farther afield to transport all necessary materials to the plain of Chartres, where the cathedral will be built. Before participating, each person must have

  been to confession, renounced enmities and revenges, and reconciled himself with his enemies … Powerful princes of the world, men brought up in honor and in wealth, nobles, men and women, have bent their proud and haughty necks to the harness of carts, and, like beasts of burden, they have dragged to the abode of Christ these wagons, loaded with wines, grains, oil, stone, wood, and all that is necessary for the wants of life or for the construction of the church.

  All this they—“often a thousand persons and more”—accomplish “in such silence that not a murmur is heard, and truly if one did not see the thing with one’s eyes, one might believe that among such a multitude there was hardly a person present.” This prayerful, anonymous work—for we lack the name of a single artist or architect who contributed to the enterprise—went on for years, for generations, and involved, as Hugo tells us, “old people, young people, little children,” all of whom thought themselves well rewarded by the grand edifice rising in their midst.

  We shall especially bear in mind Adams’s instruction that Chartres was built as “a child’s fancy; a toy-house to please the Queen of Heaven,—to please her so much that she would be happy in it,—to charm her till she smiled.” Nor shall we fail to notice that here at Chartres Hildegard’s “garden enclosed,” her exclusive retreat for virgins, has become—in its aisles and arches, its chapels and crannies, its floating islands of color and pastry-like sculptures, its scores of separate (but connected) spaces of theatrical encounter—the playground not only of the popular Virgin Queen of Heaven but of all humanity, nobles and commons, “men and women … old people, young people, little children,” a secret yet universal garden. “Regina coeli laetare, alleluia!” goes the ancient Easter hymn, now given new life in the numberless Norman cathedrals—Notre-Dame de Chartres, Notre-Dame de Paris, Notre-Dame de Laon, Notre-Dame de Noyon, Notre-Dame de Rheims, Notre-Dame d’Amiens, Notre-Dame de Rouen, Notre-Dame de Bayeux, Notre-Dame de Coutances … presque sans fin—set aside just for her. “Queen of Heaven, rejoice, alleluia!” In fact, whoop it up like a child set free—through your chancels, choirs, transepts, and naves.

  Gently elongated prophetic figures—from the left, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Simeon, John the Baptist, and Simon Peter—from the north portal of Chartres Cathedral. The first four are shown as prophets of the Incarnation. Peter, as the first priest of the new order, is dressed as a medieval pope. (Photo Credit 1.15)

  God, affectionately and with great care, fashioning Adam from clay. A twelfth-century sculpture from the north portal of Notre-Dame de Chartres. (Photo Credit 1.16)

  Triptych of stained-glass lancet windows from the Royal Portal of Chartres Cathedral. The window on the right shows the ancestors of Jesus, sprung from the root of Jesse. The middle window is a celebration of the Incarnation, showing scenes associated with Jesus’s conception, birth, and early life. The window on the left depicts the Passion, Death, and Resurrection. Needless to say, the visual stress is on the Incarnation; and once again Mary is centrally hono
red. (Photo Credit 1.17)

  Noah’s Ark, symbol of the church surviving through time despite calamities and guided by the dove (or Spirit of God). Scenes below the Ark are of people lost in the Flood, meant to remind the viewer of the consequences of the Last Judgment. Chartres Cathedral. (Photo Credit 1.18)

  Twelfth-century masterpiece, Notre-Dame de la Belle-Verrière (Our Lady of the Beautiful Stained Glass), Chartres Cathedral. (Photo Credit 1.19)

  Chartres is replete with images of Mary in sculpture and stained glass, in hidden nooks and wide bays. One in particular has held the attention of millions of pilgrims down the centuries, Notre-Dame de la Belle-Verrière (Our Lady of the Beautiful Stained Glass), a late-twelfth-century window in the choir next to the south transept. “A strange and uncanny feeling seems to haunt this window,” wrote Adams. The lines of the face have little in common with the residual severities of the Virgin in the apse of Santa Maria in Trastevere. Instead of light glistening on mosaic tiles, here light shines through colored glass. The self-dramatizing Greco-Italian faces of Trastevere have been replaced by the faces of a sweetly sensible Frenchwoman and her placidly solemn child. But there is continuity in the merriment. Like the Christ of Trastevere, the Virgin Mary smiles, if more broadly. As he was happy to be reunited with his mother, she, a royal but very earthly woman, is even happier to be the mother of her son.