by Jack Turner
St Bernard’s Family Tiff
Making a small penis splendid was hardly a recommendation to endear spices in the eyes of a celibate clergy. And it was this, though he phrased the matter a little differently, that was troubling St Bernard.
One of the most famous clerics of his age, Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) was a spiky combination of mystic, ascetic and poet, lacing transports of true lyric genius with a scouring asceticism: Wordsworth meets Jeremiah. He was, in his day, a towering figure of the European scene, with the authority to abash a haughty queen or send a rampaging feudal thug scurrying for penitence; an upbraider of popes, bloodhound for heretics, preacher of the Second Crusade, propagandist and recruiter-in-chief for the Knights Templar. And yet this glittering career was nourished on the meagre soil of the Valley of Wormwood, a wild and narrow defile carved by the river Aube through the hilly borders of Champagne and Burgundy. It was here in 1115 that Bernard had founded the monastery of Clairvaux, shepherding a small group of monks through a life of extreme privation and isolation, scorched in the summer, freezing and starving in the winter, renouncing all that was beautiful or precious in the world to find their way to God. Within this barren, cramped tract the sheer force of Bernard’s personality would work a miracle, as new recruits flocked to rumours of a monastic renaissance. They arrived in such numbers that Clairvaux fast outgrew its original site, necessitating a move downstream to new and more salubrious premises. In a matter of decades Clairvaux was less a monastery than a minor city of clerics.
Yet in the summer of 1120 the fame of Clairvaux and Bernard still lay in the future. The infant community, still struggling to survive, was smarting from a particularly wounding affront, an affront wherein Bernard detected a lingering, troubling note of spice. Though like practically every other medieval mystic Bernard repeatedly turned to spices to evoke the ineffable, seeing them as symbols of devotion, love and immortality, on this occasion they brought only bitterness. For as far as he was concerned they were, if not the primary culprits, certainly accessories to the injury he and his foundling community had suffered. They were the fuel of scandal.
It was not any effect spices might have on his own loins that concerned Bernard, but on those of his young protégé and cousin, Robert. The trouble began during Bernard’s twelve-month absence in a hermitage – ‘like a leper’s hovel’ – followed by his attendance at the Chapter-General of the Cistercian order in the autumn of 1119. While Bernard’s back was turned, Clairvaux played host to a visitor sent by the ‘prince of priors’, the Grand Prior of the great Burgundian monastery of Cluny. Whispering encouragement and blandishments in Robert’s ear, this ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing’ – Bernard’s description – succeeded in luring young Robert from the safe if not necessarily warm sanctuary of Clairvaux, abandoning its rigours, rocks and woods for the comforts of Cluny.
It was, in other words, a poaching, and a particularly underhanded one at that. That Robert was family, that he had once begged to be admitted to Clairvaux and had freely sworn his vows – all this was more than enough to try the patience of this particular saint. But in the disputatious, fractious world of twelfth-century monasticism Robert’s defection was a particularly stinging betrayal. Cluny was, by some distance, the greatest monastic establishment of the age, home to some three hundred monks and another 10,000 or so in its dependent houses, with 115 establishments in France alone. Most of the popes of the previous century were Cluny’s alumni. Clairvaux, in contrast, was as yet a monastic minnow, its few dozen monks still in need of a watertight roof. This clerical class divide fed Bernard’s sense of betrayal. Physically, Robert did not have far to travel from Clairvaux to Cluny, south from the hilly borders of Champagne through the rolling hills, plains and valleys of northern Burgundy. Spiritually, however, at least as far as Bernard was concerned, Robert’s was a step on the broad, easy road to perdition. If not quite the apostasy he hinted at, it was, in anyone’s terms, a defection.
Particularly worrisome for Bernard was the thought of the food that Robert would eat once he got there: indeed he suspected that the softness of the living at Cluny had much to do with the young turncoat’s decision. There was little that Bernard’s white monks of Clairvaux prided themselves on more than the rigour of their dietary observance, and nowhere was monastic degeneracy better exemplified, at least in Bernard’s eyes, than at Cluny. He made little secret of the fact that he regarded Cluny as an ecclesiastical fleshpot, where gluttony, loquaciousness, curiosity and intemperance went by the name of discretion; where preachers commended drunkenness and damned parsimony. It was doubly galling for Bernard – a monk who ‘went to meat as it were to torment’, and then only on doctor’s orders – that Robert would be living it up in the vast spaces of Cluny’s refectory. He had abandoned tunics for furs, vegetables for delicacies, poverty for riches. In place of the purifying austerities of Clairvaux, he would luxuriate in the Cluniacs’ soft cloths, the cosy woollens and long-sleeved tunics of the monks, the opulence of their feasts, the vivid colours of the manuscripts and the gorgeous carvings of their churches, the ‘misshapen shapeliness’ and ‘shapely misshapenness’ of their sculptures, the comforts of their lifestyle – all fed the body, not the spirit; they were the seeds of weakness, not weapons for the battle.
If Bernard is to be believed, not the least of Cluny’s temptations were the spices that the monks had no qualms about quaffing: ‘Pepper, ginger, cumin, sage, and a thousand such types of seasonings, which delight the palate, but inflame the libido.’ It was a foolhardy monk who nourished his body but hazarded the security of his soul on such dangerous foods. Discreet and sober conversation was more than enough entertainment for a clean-living Cistercian; salt and hunger the only acceptable seasonings for his cabbage, bread, beans and lentils.
In the years that followed, Bernard’s reproaches to his nephew became a minor classic, a Baedeker for the perils and pitfalls of the monastic lifestyle. The Cistercians saw to it that Bernard’s reproach to his nephew was widely disseminated – it stands at the head of his voluminous correspondence – and on the subject of spices in particular his criticisms became a monastic refrain. His hagiographer and follower William of Saint-Thierry spread much the same word to the friars of Mont Dei, imploring them to abstain from ‘concupiscent and delightful’ spices and seasonings on the grounds that they ‘endanger abstinence’: ‘It is good enough’, he argued, ‘that our food be edible.’ In due course even the story of the letter’s composition became the stuff of legend. The same William tells the tale of the saint returning from his year’s absence to find Robert departed for Cluny and its comforts, whereupon he stormed out to the mountainside with a secretary, to whom he began dictating. A sudden downpour appeared in the summer sky, but Bernard insisted that the secretary keep writing: ‘This is’, he reproached his timid companion, ‘God’s work.’ Chastened, the monk continued, and though both he and Bernard were soaked to the skin the parchment, mirabile dictu, remained bone-dry. To mark the miracle a chapel was built on the site, where it stood until the Revolution.
Helped along by such tales, Bernard’s opinions were assured of a wide audience; some of the reverberations, we shall see, are still with us today. But Bernard was far from alone in decrying the corrupting, eroticising influence of spice. As the trade picked up after the tenth century, the risqué reputation of spices was if anything enhanced, gaining if not in lustre then certainly in currency and notoriety. And as they moved to the fore in medicine, cuisine, perfumery and aphrodisiacs, so in the moral economy of high medievalism the sense of their insidious, cheating charms was raised to a level undreamed of before or since. As spices were conspicuous to their admirers, so they were conspicuously disliked. Though the terms of the squabble were generally couched in the language of Christian morality, for centuries after Bernard fired off his reproaches in the ‘rain without rain’, spices served as a touchstone for deeper debates, both clerical and secular, on the vexed questions of food, luxury, economy, poverty and abs
tinence. And as is often the way with dissent, these criticisms offer an insight into the last and most ambivalent of the many attractions of spice.
On one level it should come as no surprise that an ascetic Christian monk such as Bernard should have objected to these most worldly of foodstuffs. It is more remarkable that this marked clerical distaste for spice co-existed with celebration. For spices were, as we have seen, metaphors for godliness and the ineffable: odours of virtue, the only thing remotely comparable to the Virgin. As has been noted, Bernard’s fellow mystic and forebear Peter Damian possessed a similarly spiced imagination, comparing the shelter of a monastery (Cluny, no less) to a spiced paradise of delights, redolent with sweet-smelling spices, flowers and the odours of virtues. It tended to be precisely those mystics who praised the heavenly spices who most deplored their use on earth. There is scarcely a major mystical writer who does not show the same duality. What was fine in heaven was on earth distasteful, even dangerous.
There was a good deal more to this ambivalence than a particularly monkish double standard. Indeed it relied on an opposition central to the mindset of medieval mysticism in the form of a radical separation of this world and the next. It was precisely because the Bernards viewed the divide between heaven and earth as so profound that the symbolically sublime might be base, even sacrilegious in reality. It was the context and intent that mattered. For this reason Peter Damian even went so far as to compare spices to the forbidden apple of Eden. To his horror, one Christmas Day he was served spiced wine in the hermitage of Gamugno: ‘For what was good by nature, is made bad by the sin of disobedience; and what the Creator had soundly forbidden, is made deadly by man through usurpation of his freedom of will.’ If a mere apple had sufficed to cast man out of paradise, how much worse was a luxurious, libidinous delicacy?
From the distance of the twenty-first century, the sheer intensity of his or Bernard’s complaint cannot fail to strike us as overdone – easily dismissed as yet more medieval harping on the old saw that anything remotely pleasurable must be bad for you. Yet in medical terms, Bernard was merely repeating the orthodoxy. Given their aphrodisiac reputation, it was manifest that there was a problem in reconciling spices with the profession of celibacy. To Bernard’s mind, even without spices the flesh was so frail as to need no encouragement to sin. Even for intellectuals like Bernard, demons were real and all around, few of them as insidious and opportunist as goatish Asmodeus, the demon of lust.*
After lust came gluttony. As their pagan critics had never tired of pointing out, spices and seasonings served no evident nutritional purpose, merely making the food taste better and thereby whetting the appetite for more. The message was easily translated into Christian terms. To St Augustine pepper was a hallmark of the glutton, gorging himself on rare and exotic vegetables and course after course ‘well sprinkled with pepper’ – a telling contrast with Augustine’s ideal, a frugal, sparing diet of just enough cabbage and lard to take the edge off a hunger.
Given these premises, then, that spices occupied a conspicuous place in Christian dietary jeremiads was all but inevitable. They epitomised everything that food should not be, for which reason it comes as no surprise to find that an ingrained wariness of spices is present in some of the founding documents of the monastic tradition. In the East, Serapion, the fourth-century companion of the Egyptian hermit St Antony, knew cloves and pepper as potent aphrodisiacs. At roughly the same time the Rule of St Basil forbade sumptuous dishes prepared from expensive seasonings. In the West, his contemporary St Jerome laid out the founding principles of the medieval Christian diet in a series of letters to aspirant monks and nuns. In a letter written from Rome around 394 he stipulated that the would-be monk should refrain from pepper and other such delicacies as pistachios and dates, for ‘while we follow after dainties we distance ourselves from heaven’. Poverty was safer for the soul, and one should eat accordingly: ‘For we, the poor and the humble, have no riches, nor do we deign to accept offerings. Peasants buy neither balsam, pepper or dates. Those who seek to be rich fall into temptation and the snares of the devil.’
Jerome’s objections would play a huge role in shaping Christian attitudes about diet in the years and centuries to come. When in the sixth century St Benedict wrote his Rule for the monastic life he insisted that the monks’ food should be plain, nutritious and no more than adequate. The rejection of spices was made still more explicit in a fourth-century letter long attributed to Sulpicius Severus, one of the pioneers of Western monasticism, addressed to the head of a small monastic community in Roman Gaul. The author writes that he has sent the community a new kitchen hand, not excusing but revelling in his lack of culinary sophistication:
After I beard that all your cooks had abandoned your kitchen, I believe because they disdained to perform their duties with common seasonings, I sent a small boy from our own staff, adequately well taught to cook beans and pickle humble beets in vinegar and juice, and to provide an ordinary porridge for the gullets of the hungry monks; he is ignorant of pepper, innocent of laser [another costly seasoning much esteemed in Roman cooking], but comfortable with cumin, and a dab hand at plying the noisy mortar with sweet-smelling herbs.
Besides being a bad cook he was a psychotic gardener (‘if admitted to the garden he will mow down anything in his reach with a sword’). All exotic and expensive seasonings were expelled from the cloister kitchen.
And that was where they stayed, at least in theory, for well over a thousand years – which was where, more or less, we met Bernard firing off his letter in the rain on the mountainside. Thus on the subject of spices Bernard was merely repeating ancient if somewhat dusty commonplaces. These were, moreover, commonplaces that for his fellow Cistercians had the force of law, the superiors of the order having decreed that ‘in the cloister we generally use no pepper, nor cumin, nor spices of this type, but only common herbs such as our own land produces’.
This situation would not change for the remainder of the Middle Ages, on paper at least. But while such odium may well have put spices beyond the pale it certainly did not put them out of use, whether in literal or strictly literary terms. Just as Bernard used spices to shame a runaway nephew, so too they constantly recur in Christian polemic as a convenient badge of dishonour, a token of the unmonastic monk. Even in Bernard’s day the character of the gluttonous friar, more concerned with his stomach than his (or anyone’s) soul, was established as a feature of the literary landscape. Typical of the genre is a twelfth-century satire of a slothful, gluttonous and lustful abbot who naturally loves his spices and sauces. He wakes up puking from the excesses of the night before, meditating ‘more on his sauces than on sacraments, more on salmon than on Solomon’, interspersing his ‘laudates’ and ‘misereres’ with stinking farts and belches. He stuffs himself with eggs and cracked pepper, fifty-five at a time. ‘Of his sauces and condiments what can I tell? He is served the blackest, thickest, hottest, richest, sharpest pepper sauces … these are the sufferings he endures for Christ.’ In similar vein a monk at the French abbey of Ligugé punned bitterly of his fellows ‘who ought to speak religiously of celestial spirits [esprits], but talk instead of terrestrial spices [espices]!’
The sense of inconsistency on which these satires depended took still more visceral form in the works of Alain of Lille (c.1128–1202), a monk who outdid even his fellow Cistercian Bernard in inventing new and more lurid consequences of too much spice, the most startling of which being the claim that spices and sodomy go together like a horse and carriage. His poem Nature’s Complaint, probably the most sustained and splenetic work on sodomy* ever written, takes the form of an agonised dialogue between Alain and a personification of Nature, each fretting over how it is that ‘the entire world is imperilled by the flames of impure love’, as Nature puts it. The poem begins with a vision granted Alain in a dream, in which a grieving Nature confronts him with a harrowing depiction of a world turned upside down, where laughter is turned to tears and joy to weeping, the seals
of chastity shattered, the grace of Nature’s bounty squandered, men unmanned and society wrecked by the monster of sensualism, ‘hims made hers’, predicate turned subject and the whole modern world generally gone to pot, shipwrecked in a flood of gluttony and swallowed up in a ravening Charybdis of the gullet.
Of this foul wrong spices were at once totem, symptom and cause. To Alain gluttony was a deadly sin of a thousand forms, one of its most pernicious and perverse mutations being over-elaborate food, particularly the complex spiced sauces so sought after by the aristocracy and, if Alain is to be believed, the clergy. As Nature complains: ‘For although my liberality provides men with so many different types of food, rains on them such copious dishes, they are nevertheless ungrateful for my favours, abusing lawful things to illicit excess, loosening the brakes of gluttony, exceeding the measures of eating and extending their capacity for drinking ad infinitum; seducing their palates with the tang of sauces, so they might drink more and more frequently, to be thirsty more often.’ The worst gluttons she identifies are the prelates, the worst food the spices. In Alain’s hands, clerical spice consumption becomes almost a satanic, perverted rite. Like idolaters worshipping their sacred pepper, the clergy’s sexual depravity was mirrored and egged on by the perverse ingenuity of their cuisine, the spiced fish and fowl wallowing in their thick and spicy sauces. Ungrateful and unsatisfied with Nature’s bounty, they seek out new sauces, slathering on the spice and whipping up their carnal appetites for yet more indulgence:
This pestilence is not content with common, humble folk, but is widely found among prelates, who, befouling the rite of baptism, baptise salmon, pike and other equally special fish in a font of their sacred pepper, crucifying them in several martyrdoms of cookery, so that, baptised by such a baptism, they might acquire an agreeably complex flavour. Meanwhile, at the same table, the beast of the earth is overwhelmed by a flood of pepper, the fish swims in pepper, birds are ensnared in its viscosity.