Pilgrimage: An Image of Mediaeval Religion

by Jonathan Sumption

  In some of the oldest writings of the Church the Devil takes the form of wild animals. He appears to St. Martin, for example, as a bull. According to Sulpicius Severus, St. Martin ‘could see the Devil with his own eyes however cleverly he might disguise himself’. Peter the Venerable, the scholarly twelfth-century abbot of Cluny, collected a large number of stories illustrating the various forms in which the Devil assaulted sinners – a spider, a vulture in the sky, a bear seen in the forest near Cluny, a black pig found in the chapter house at Norwich, and a thousand other frightening creatures. Savage dogs occupied a sinister place in the mediaeval imagination. Walter, a monk of Durham in the twelfth century, was attacked by the Devil in the form of a huge black hound, while Guibert of Nogent’s mother believed that lesser devils appeared as packs of small dogs to terrify children.

  The Devil’s most sinister form was that of a deformed, distorted human being, the horrifying figure so familiar from the sculptures of the Romanesque churches of France, or from Flemish paintings of the fifteenth century. This vision of the Devil makes its first appearance in the writings of the desert monks of the third and fourth centuries and particularly in one of the most influential saints’ lives ever written, the Life of St. Anthony by Athanasius. During his twenty years in the desert, St. Anthony was said to have suffered temptations which are clearly modelled on those of Christ. He was perpetually conscious that ‘the air around him was full of evil spirits’. The Devil frightened him at night, aroused carnal desires in him, tempted him to return to the comforts of civilization, and even struck him blows. The Devil commonly appeared to St. Anthony as a ‘little black boy, his appearance matching his mind, with flashing eyes and fiery breath, and horns on his head, half-man, half-ass’. This is probably why the Devil is so often described by mediaeval writers as a negro or ‘Ethopian’. It is also the origin of the idea that the Devil was a being, almost human, possessed of human cunning and human malice. In his biography of St. Benedict, Gregory the Great describes the temptations of his hero in terms borrowed from the Life of St. Anthony while the same conventions are observed more than five centuries later by Peter the Venerable. When the Devil visited the sick-bed of a monk of Cluny who had experienced fleeting doubts about the doctrine of the real presence, he was ‘like a small black Ethopian, horribly deformed, with horns coming out of his ears and fire from his mouth as if he was about to eat the very flesh of the sick monk’.

  It was very widely believed that dreams were a direct revelation of the supernatural world. A deepening sense of guilt about real or imaginary sins frequently resulted in nightmares in which all the sinister fantasies found in the writings of Peter the Venerable seemed to become reality. In the 1170s the daughter of a knight called Sewal had a recurrent nightmare in which she was attacked by devils in the form of vicious black dogs; she was convinced that her dream had actually happened, and was taken by her parents to St.-Léonard de Noblat, near Limoges, and then to Canterbury in the hope of a cure. A boy aged fifteen from the Cluniac priory of Pontefract dreamed that demons were trying to strangle him, and he too was taken to Canterbury. Nor did such nightmares afflict only the sensitive and the simple. Stephen of Hoyland, a knight and a man of some substance, suffered from the same nocturnal terrors for thirty years before a visit to Canterbury brought him peace of mind. In a window of the south-west transept of the cathedral, he is shown lying awake at night with a devil at the foot of his bed and another at the head.

  In popular thinking, the Devil’s organization and methods were a reflection of God’s. He too had his twelve apostles of evil, his rites, and his Church. Just as God lived in the righteous, so the Devil ‘possessed’ the sinful. Sin physically delivered the sinner into the Devil’s hands. ‘In sign’, explains a fifteenth-century preacher, ‘that of them that are like hogs in gluttony, the fiends have power to dwell in them and to drench them in the sea of Hell.’ ‘Possession’ of this sort was physical as well as spiritual. Hysteria, however caused, was a symptom of possession, and doubtless it was often in practice caused by intense guilt. Romanus, a monk of St.-Evroul in the eleventh century, was an incorrigible kleptomaniac who frequently had to be rebuked by the abbot for petty thefts in the monastery.

  ‘One night as he lay in bed, a demon set upon him and horribly tormented him. Hearing his hideous shrieks the monks rushed to his aid and by shaking him and sprinkling him with holy water, they finally succeeded in freeing him from the devil who possessed him. When he came to himself he recognized that the devil had gained this power over him through the thefts that he had committed.’

  The idea of devils ‘possessing’ the sexually unchaste is particularly common in monastic writing, and the sculpted figure of ‘Luxuria’ abetted by a demon is found in many monastic churches of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In the nave of the abbey of Vézelay there is a terrifying capital showing Woman the seductress leading a young man to despair and ultimately to suicide, while a similar capital in Autun cathedral shows a young man tempted by a naked woman and thereupon being grasped from behind by a devil.

  The Approach of Death

  The sense of constant menace which these malignant forces aroused was heightened by a preoccupation with death verging on the obsessional. The brevity of human life and. the imminence of death were commonplaces of mediaeval preaching for, as Chaucer’s parson observed, the majority of conversions to the pious life were probably due to the fear of damnation: ‘the … cause that oghte moeve a man to contrition is drede of the daye of dome and of the horrible peynes of hell.’

  The celebrated thirteenth-century preacher Jacques de Vitry one day encountered a man who asserted that a single word had turned him to God. He had asked himself whether the souls of the damned could be freed from torment after a thousand years. He answered in his mind: ‘no’ If after a hundred thousand years: ‘no.’ If after a thousand thousand: ‘no’ ‘And pondering these things he saw how transitory life was, and thus a single word, “no”, converted him to God,’ The sermons of mediaeval preachers are full of such ‘conversions’. A loose-living student of Bologna was reformed when a Dominican told him how hard would be the beds in Hell. Caesarius of Heisterbach knew of several who were converted by hearing great preachers. Another was reformed by the sight of a funeral service, while sudden illness and imminent death were responsible for countless conversions. ‘Indeed’, Caesarius concluded, ‘the occasions of conversion are innumerable.’ But not all such conversions are edifying tales in sermons. Many people undoubtedly experienced genuine transformations during which they regarded themselves as beginning a new life, as entering an elite order for whose members the chances of salvation were infinitely greater. In the early Church, Christians were frequently not baptized until they had resolved to live the most perfect possible life. St. Augustine was not baptized until the age of thirty-three, and he spoke of it then as his ‘conversion’. Bede and Gregory the Great both used the word ‘conversion’ to mean entry into the monastic life. Indeed the ‘conversion’ of saints was the classic stock-in-trade of mediaeval hagiographers from the time of St. Athanasius onwards. The same pattern – worldliness, conversion, sanctity – is repeated in biographies of St. Martin, St. Benedict, St. Dunstan, Odo of Cluny, Bernard of Clairvaux and countless others who attracted the admiration of their contemporaries.

  From the notion of the converted elite was born the belief that the overwhelming majority of men were damned. This tradition was strong in the early Church and, indeed, it was natural in a minority religion suffering abuse and persecution. But it survived to become a corner-stone of the moral teaching of the mediaeval Church, a recurring feature of the sermons of revivalist preachers and the visions of mystics. St. Bernard had little doubt that there were ‘few, very few who will be saved’, while Berthold of Regensburg, the great German preacher of the thirteenth century, assured his audiences that less than one in a thousand of them would ascend to Paradise. ‘If we believed’, wrote the fifteenth-century Dominican John Herolt, ‘that one
man only out of the entire human race, was doomed to perdition, would not every man be afraid lest he himself should be that one? … How much more then does he have cause to fear, when God himself has said that “many are called but few are chosen.”’

  In 1091 a parish priest of Normandy reported an extraordinary vision to the bishop of Lisieux. As he was returning from his rounds one winter’s night he seemed to hear the tramp of a great army in the distance. At first he assumed that it was the army of the notorious Robert de Bellême, engaged in some private war. But then a great ghostly defile appeared in the moonlight and marched past him, well-known murderers, noble ladies on horse-back, thieves, prelates, judges, and knights. All were being escorted to Hell by squads of negroid demons. Amongst them were men of great repute in their lifetimes, some of whom had seemed to be holy men. Hugh, bishop of Lisieux was amongst them, as were the abbots of St.-Evroul and St.-Wandrille ‘and many others whose names I forget, for man’s eye is frequently deceived but God sees them to the very marrow.’

  It is difficult to decide how far this uninviting philosophy commanded general acceptance, for the denunciations of preachers are not always a true reflection of mediaeval religious life. As the preachers themselves readily admitted, their words often fell on deaf ears, and there is no doubt that the later mediaeval period, for which surviving sermon material is richest, was also a period of notable popular worldliness. The prior of Holy Trinity, London reported in 1200 that ‘many believe neither in good nor in bad angels, nor in life or death or any other spiritual things which they cannot see with their own eyes.’ There were scoffers, complained Vincent of Beauvais, who openly laughed at graphic representations of Hell. Berthold of Regensburg devoted a whole sermon to the refutation of those sceptics who argued that the soul must become insensitive to the pains of Hell if they are indeed of infinite duration. Belief in a merciful God was even, occasionally, regarded as evidence of heresy. An Albigensian who appeared before the Inquisition of Languedoc declared that if he could lay his hands on that God who saved but one out of a thousand of the creatures he created, he would tear him to pieces and spit in his face. Most people, however, were not inclined to criticize official doctrines, and they continued to provide audiences for mendicant preachers. Margery Kempe, the visionary of King’s Lynn at the beginning of the fifteenth century, had originally refused to believe that most men were damned ‘and when Our Lord showed her any that should be damned she had great pain; she would not hear of it … and put it out of her mind as much as she might.’ But the Lord was displeased at this aberration and punished her until she came to accept the orthodox doctrine.

  Mediaeval men were familiar with a number of detailed descriptions of Hell. The picture of Hell was repeatedly presented to them by imaginative preachers like master Richard Alkerton, who declared in 1406, in a sermon delivered in London, that the damned would be

  ‘boiled in fire and brimstone without end. Venomous worms … shall gnaw all their members unceasingly, and the worm of conscience shall gnaw the soul. … Now ye shall have everlasting bitterness…. This fire that tormenteth you shall never be quenched, and they that tormenteth you shall never be weary neither die.’

  The scenes carved on the west fronts at Conques or Bourges find their counterpart in the hand-books of preachers. The Pricke of Conscience, one of the most popular of these manuals, draws a picture of Hell with intense dramatic power: the hideous din, the shrieks of the tortured, the ‘raumping of devils, the dyngyng and dysching’ of their glowing hammers, and the closely packed mass of humanity swaying this way and that in the infernal oven, each fighting and scratching at his neighbour’s face like a grinning madman, or ripping off his own flesh with indescribable passion. A good many of these descriptions originated in visions, or in the accounts of those who claimed to have descended bodily into Hell. In the time of Bede, a Northumbrian who claimed to have returned to life described it as an ever-deepening pit where sinners suffered extremes of cold and heat, their cries drowned by the harsh laughter of demons. ‘Do you know who all these souls are?’ asked his guide: ‘they are the souls who failed to confess and atone for their sins until they were dying.’ Amongst seventh-century writers it seems to have been agreed that the torments of Hell consisted of alternating extremes of heat and cold. The hermit Guthlac saw it as ‘sulphurous eddies of flames mixed with freezing hail’, a mental image which remained common throughout the middle ages. Even Shakespeare’s Claudio feared

  To bathe in fiery floods or to reside

  In thrilling region of thick ribbed ice

  (Measure for Measure III. i)

  Educated men may not always have believed these tales of bodily descents into Hell, though Bede and Gregory the Great certainly did. But the descriptions of Hell which were based on them reflected notions held more or less consistently by every generation. Guibert of Nogent’s mother, after the death of her husband, ‘saw by a wonderful dispensation of God in frequent visions the clearest possible images of the pains he was enduring in Purgatory.’ A servant of Ludwig, landgrave of Thuringia, claimed that he had been permitted a glimpse into Hell, where he had been able to watch the torments of his former master. Such accounts were received everywhere with considerable interest. When, for example, a monk of Eynsham experienced an unusually vivid dream of Purgatory in 1196, the bishop of Lincoln instructed a detailed record to be made of it for the edification of his diocesans.

  Profound pessimism was one of the principal characteristics of mediaeval religion. At a popular level it bred a fatalism in which the resort to rituals with the object of expiating sin, becomes somewhat easier to understand. The salvation of an individual man was nothing less than a miracle, to be sought of God through the intercession of the saints. In a powerful sermon on damnation, Berthold of Regensburg asserted that the salvation of a sinner was ‘one of the greatest miracles that ever God does. That is why we sing in the Mass “Mirabilis Deus in sanctis suis”, God is wonderful in his saints.’ The relics of the saints, repeated a theologian of the twelfth century, were the means whereby the faithful might resist the power of evil in the world. They gave health to the bodies of men and absolution to their souls: ‘the body of Elijah give life to the dead and remove death’s sting from the living.’

  Notes

  1 English villages and towns: Stubbs, Charters, pp. 464–6.

  Henry of Susa: Quoted in G. Le Bras, Institutions ecclesiastiques de la Chretienté mediévale, vol. i, Paris, 1964–5, p. 204.

  No strangers in church: O. Dobiache-Rojdestvensky, La vie paroissale en France d’après les actes épiscopaux, Paris, 1911, pp. 87–8.

  2 Confession once a year: Cone. Lateran (1215), canon XXI, MC. xxii. 1007–10. On its enforcement in France, Cone. Saintes (1280), MC. xxiv. 379–80; and in England, Cone. Exeter (1287), Powicke and Cheney, Councils, vol. ii, p. 992.

  Held in public: MC. xxiv. 527. Cf. Powicke and Cheney, Councils, vol. ii, p. 144; for fifteenth century, Gerson, De Officio Pastoris, ed. Glorieux, vol. v, p. 141.

  Confessional hand-books: e.g. Powicke and Cheney, Councils, vol. ii, pp. 220–6. W. A. Pantin, The English Church in the fourteenth century, Cambridge, 1955, pp. 270–6.

  Prostitute repents: Mirac. S. Mariae Carnotensis XVII, pp. 533–4. Busybodies: ‘Visitation returns of the diocese of Hereford in 1397’, ed. A. T. Bannister, EHR. xliv (1929), pp. 279–89, 444–53, xlv (1930), pp. 92–101, 444–63. Guérin and Célier (ed.), Documents concernant le Poitou, vol. xxiv, pp. 134–6, 287–9 (nos. 780–1, 836); late fourteenth century. John Myrc, Instructions for parish priests, ed. E. Peacock, EETS., vol. xxxi, London, 1868, p. 23.

  3 London lady dying: Benedict, Mirac. S. Thomae, II. 42, p. 90.

  ‘Curiosity to see …’: Wattenbach (ed.), ‘Beitrage’, p. 605.

  Guilt overcome by travel: Orderic Vitalis, Hist. Eccl., ed. Chibnall, vol. ii, pp. 44–6. Adam of Eynsham, Vita S. Hugonis, IV. 2, vol. ii, pp. 7–10. Paul Walther, Itin., pp. 7–8.

  4 ‘Signs’ inspire terror: G
regory of Tours, De Virtut. S. Martini, III. 54, p. 645 (darkness). Vita S. Genovefae, V. 19, ed. C. Kohler, BEHE, vol. xlviii, Paris, 1881, p. 24; Vita S. Aridii, in Mabillon (ed.), Vet. Anal., p. 204 (thunder). Eligius (attrib.), Homilia, IX, PL. lxxxvii. 628 (eclipse of moon). Gregory of Tours, Hist. Francorum, VI. 14, IV. 31, 51, pp. 284, 164–5, 187 (red sky, eclipse of sun).

  Survival of these fears: Burchardt, Decr., XIX. 5, PL. cxl. 971. Guibert, De Vita Sua, I. 15, p. 56. Mirac. S. Benedicti, VI. 11, pp. 233–6 (death of Robert the Pious). Langland, Piers Plowman, B.V. 13–5, pp. 57–8.

  Roman de la Rose, 11. 18, 257–18, 468, vol. iii, pp. 48–55.

  5 Evil in the wind: Gregory of Tours, De Virtutibus S. Martini, III. 16, p. 636. Toussaert, p. 365 (Dunkirk abbey). Delaruelle et al., pp. 831–2 (German Dominicans). Bruno, Expositio in Ep. ad Ephesianos, II, PL. cliii. 325. Yvo, Panormia, VIII. 68, PL. clxi. 1322.

  Devil in wild animals: Sulpicius Severus, Vita S. Martini, XXI, pp. 130–1. Peter the Venerable, De Mirac., I. 14, 18, cols. 877–8, 883–4, etc. Thomas of Monmouth, Mirac. S. Willelmi, III. 12, pp. 137–8 (pig at Norwich). Reginald of Durham, De B. Cuthberti Virtut., XVII, pp. 32–3. Guibert, De Vita Sua, I. 21, pp. 81–2.

  6 Devil as deformed man: Athanasius, Vita S. Antonii, V, VI, XXI, XL, XLII, LIII, PG. xxvi. 845–9, 876, 901, 904–5, 920. Cf. Peter the Venerable, De Mirac, I. 8, col. 869 (‘parvi etnigerrimi Aethiopis specie assumpta’); Orderic, Hist., Eccl., VIII. 17, ed. Chibnall, vol. iv, pp. 242–4 (‘agmen Aethiopum … nigerrimi cornipedis’).