Mysteries of the Middle Ages
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We have no Roman emperor, good or bad, to bend to. We have no pope to whom we need pay the slightest heed. Dante believed that the pope should be confined to religious matters and that the realms of church and state should be basically unmixable. If he could have thought of such a thing, he would have approved of our modern secular idea of the political separation of church and state.
Dante also believed that only a great and good emperor, a man of universal understanding, could bring peace and justice to his realms. The kind of emperor he had in mind was more an institution than a single person. If he could have thought of such a thing, he would have found the United Nations, with all its flaws and limitations, closer to his ideal than would be any conceivable monarch.
What preoccupied Dante most of all was the acquisitive, dissembling, violence-prone politician, whether clerical or lay, who could lie to himself and lie to others—creating “a vast tapestry of lies,” as Harold Pinter called it in his Nobel Prize speech—give orders to torture the helpless and banish the innocent while on his way into church, hold men prisoner indefinitely without charging them, execute them boldly and self-righteously, persecute religious and ethnic minorities, refuse to acknowledge the mercenary motives of his closest advisers, abrogate international treaties, pollute whole ecosystems while pretending to do otherwise, and declare his vicious wars just, necessary, and blessed by God. Especially to be feared was the man who did all these things and got away with them because his earnest good looks and earthy sincerity concealed his real intentions from many observers and because he was too powerful to be stopped. Such a man was Philip the Fair, unscrupulous, suspicious, envious, and rigid, who succeeded his father to the French throne in 1285, who regularly blackened the reputation of anyone who dared oppose him, and who fancied himself the “most Christian” of Christian kings.
SOME MAJOR MEDIEVALS
IN THE ORDER OF THEIR BIRTH
CONSTANTINE THE GREAT c. 280–337
AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO 354–430
BENEDICT OF NURSIA c. 480–547
JUSTINIAN I 483–565
THEODORA I 500–548
GREGORY I THE GREAT c. 540–604
CHARLEMAGNE 742–814
ALFRED THE GREAT 849–899
PETER ABELARD 1079–1144
BERNARD OF CLAIRVAUX 1090–1153
HILDEGARD OF BINGEN 1098–1179
HÉLOÏSE 1101–1164
ELEANOR OF AQUITAINE c. 1122–1204
FREDERICK I BARBAROSSA c. 1123–1190
HENRY II PLANTAGENET 1133–1189
MOSES MAIMONIDES 1135–1204
INNOCENT III c. 1160–1216
FRANCIS OF ASSISI 1182–1226
ALBERT THE GREAT c. 1200–1280
ROGER BACON 1214–1292
BONAVENTURE c. 1221–1274
THOMAS AQUINAS c. 1225–1274
BONIFACE VIII c. 1235–1303
GIOVANNI CIMABUE c. 1240–1302?
MARCO POLO 1254–1324
DANTE ALIGHIERI 1265–1321
GIOTTO DI BONDONE 1266–1337
PHILIP IV THE FAIR 1268–1314
GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO 1313–1375
GEOFFREY CHAUCER c. 1340–1400
CATHERINE OF SIENA 1347–1380
a Dante’s wrongheaded assignment of Justinian to Heaven was possible because he knew so little about the man, and what he thought he knew had been so thoroughly corrupted by legendary invention. Similarly, he places Bernard of Clairvaux in Heaven, whereas I would exclude him, despite his undoubted importance, on account of his insufferable self-righteousness. Dante knew far less than we do about the life (as opposed to the pious writing) of Bernard. Bernard had been canonized in 1174, almost a century before Dante was born; and Dante, despite his bad opinion of many popes, took with all seriousness the act of papal canonization. Dante’s assignments to the afterlife are spot on whenever he actually knew someone (e.g., Boniface VIII) but less accurate for those he knew only by their medieval reputations.
b Recent findings by Jewish scholars—for instance, Daniel Baraz, Medieval Cruelty: Changing Perceptions, Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period, and Norman Cantor in many works—support this view. Cantor’s Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages contains several informative entries, especially “Jews in the Middle Ages.”
POSTLUDE:
Love in the Ruins
A Dantesque Reflection
If the world grows too worldly,
it can be rebuked by the
Church; but if the Church
grows too worldly, it cannot be
adequately rebuked for
worldliness by the world.
—G. K. CHESTERTON
AND IF THE CHURCH GROWS too evil? Who shall rebuke it then? The story this book has had to tell is the story of the (often overlooked and belittled) Catholic contribution to Western civilization. In this story, power-mad popes and greedy kings make only cameo appearances. The main subject is what it has been in each volume of the Hinges of History: “the story of the great gift-givers, those who entrusted to our keeping one or another of the singular treasures that make up the patrimony of the West.”
Dante prayed for a reformed Catholic Church in which clergy would be unable to insert themselves directly into the political process. We, by reformation, enlightenment, revolution, and democracy—the movements that rose in the centuries after the story told in this book—have achieved a (usually adequate) separation of church and state. The pope, for instance, now controls only nominal territory and could not raise an army even if he wished to.
But however necessary this was for the health of society, it has not improved the health of the Catholic Church, now caught like a helpless animal in a trap from which there seems no escape. The priestly pedophilia crisis has enveloped almost all of Catholic life, certainly in the United States, as well as in many other countries around the world. The response of bishops, cardinals, and popes has been staggering in its inadequacy. At first, as we all know, they attempted to minimize the extent of the wound that had been inflicted on the church. They hired aggressive attorneys to defend themselves against poor victims;a they underreported the numbers of perpetrators; they underreported the numbers of victims; they blamed the media. At last, it became clear that for more years than anyone will ever know, bishops have routinely reassigned priestly predators, allowing them to take advantage of fresh crops of child victims, paying off victims in return for their silence, and keeping everything hush-hush.
Bernard Law—Cardinal Coverup himself—forced to flee office as archbishop of Boston, was even rewarded with the position of archpriest of Santa Maria Maggiore by a grateful Pope John Paul II. Law’s new position, which permits him to reside in the most luxurious palace in Rome, also prevents his arrest by secular authorities, for Santa Maria Maggiore is extraterritorial, a fief of the Vatican beyond the reach of Italian law. John Paul’s successor, Benedict XVI, the former Joseph Ratzinger, has dragged his feet for years on prosecuting (or even investigating) notorious pedophile priests. (See the reference to Jason Berry’s Vows of Silence in the note below.) The latest Vatican ploy is to blame the crisis on homosexual priests and to devise ways to root them out. This would be comical to anyone who knows a variety of Catholic priests and bishops (since so many are homosexual in orientation, if not in intergenital activity), were it not for the further destruction such an inquisition is likely to wreak on an already demoralized priesthood.
Though the U.S. bishops have been forced to create a (more or less) public policy for dealing with these outrages, the Vatican has remained remarkably coy. One cardinal—Dario Castrillon Hoyos, prefect of the Congregation of the Clergy, at a press briefing in spring 2002—even suggested that this was a problem confined to the English-speaking world.b The truth of the matter is that the English-speaking world has a tradition of truth-telling in public that is not replicated elsewhere, especially not in Italy, where an admission of forced buggery (like the admission of rape by a woman victim in a Muslim coun
try) would bring such opprobrium on the male victim that he could never hold up his head again but could well expect to be further brutalized. (I love Italy, but I am not in the dark about its limitations.)
Dante bewailed the selling of church offices, describing this practice as “Christ [being] bought and sold the whole day long” in the Rome of Pope Boniface VIII. That was, however, a far less depraved situation than the current one, where, as Dante would be forced to conclude, the twelve-year-old Christ, who conversed with the doctors of the law in the Temple of Jerusalem (in Luke 2:41–52), is made to give blow jobs and rammed up the ass the whole day long by the doctors of the law of the New Jerusalem, while the high priests of the Temple stand guard at the entrances, lest any uninitiated outsiders should discover what is going on. However shocking these words may sound to some ears, there can be no doubt that this is what clerical dissemblers have done to the Jesus they claim to care so much about. For “whatever you have done to the least of these … you have done to me” (Matthew 25:40).
At this point, the church seems built not on the Rock of Peter but on sand—the shifting sand of sexually immature priests and of bishops who lie and fawn for a living. It is not so much the vow of celibacy in itself that has brought this crisis about. But enforced, rather than chosen, celibacy, defended by an episcopate of high priests who need fear nothing either from ordinary priests or from lay Catholics, but only from those hierarchs who can bestow or withhold all offices and favors, has brought the church almost to its death throes.
If this church is to survive, it must return to the practices of its apostolic foundations, when celibacy was optional and all clergy—from deacons to bishops (there were no cardinals or popes in those days)—were chosen by the people. A policy of optional celibacy would attract more sexually healthy candidates to the priesthood (rather than the many self-deceivers who are now attracted) and even restore the glory of monasticism. We all need to know that there remain in our harried world symbolic oases of monastic peace; and we all need monks and nuns, whether we know it or not, people who are free from earthly ties and who in great societal perversions, like the fascist regimes of the Second World War, are available to hide political prey from their predators. Popular election of clergy would put responsibility for the church squarely where it belongs—with the church itself, that is, with the Assembly of God’s people. The only hope is for an uprising of laypeople who refuse to be disfranchised serfs any longer, led by sincere movements like Voice of the Faithful and Call to Action, which will remove the only power the laity can now claim, the power of the purse, from clerical hands. If this should happen, we will see the political power, which no one gives up willingly, wither. It is only stolen power anyway; it never belonged to the bishops by right. “Vox populi, vox Dei,” as even Charlemagne knew. “The voice of the people is the voice of God.”
As the preceding chapters have demonstrated, it was not bishops but laypeople who were responsible for the historic glories of Catholicism, given as gifts to the Western world. Of the great figures processing through this book, only a few, like Thomas Aquinas, were ordained, and only one, Gregory the Great, was a member of the higher clergy. The historic role of the higher clergy is to be put in their place by men like Dante and women like Catherine of Siena, who journeyed to Avignon in the fourteenth century to wag her finger under the pope’s nose and to remind him of his neglected responsibilities. Without the clear vision and unwelcome advice of such men and women, the church as it is has no chance of acting in the world in succor or in prophecy. (The Catholic Church in the United States may be doomed in any case, unless the episcopate as a whole resigns, divesting itself of its gorgeous robes and walking off the world’s stage in sackcloth and ashes. For the bishops who now hold office are surely impostors.)
Like tenants on an eighteenth-century estate, we live amid romantic ruins, a chancel arch here, a crumbling lancet window there, awaiting revenant figures of reformation—the return of energizing, enveloping forces like Hildegard and Francis, Giotto and Dante. We might even find ourselves mumbling a prayer like the one whispered by the anonymous bard who once stood looking at the ruins of Kilcash Castle on the southeast slope of Slievenamon in County Tipperary:
I beseech of Mary and Jesus
That the great come home again
With long dances danced in the garden,
Fiddle music and mirth among men,
That Kilcash the home of our fathers
Be lifted on high again,
And from that to the deluge of waters
In bounty and peace remain.
What is there left to say but “Amen”?
a This ploy was favored viciously by Edward Egan, the current cardinal archbishop of New York, when he was bishop of Bridgeport, Connecticut. Egan is a clerical insider with almost no pastoral experience. He worked his way up the ladder by adept sycophancy in the Vatican’s curial offices. He has had virtually no impact on New York in the years since his appointment, except for his single public act of changing the name of the nineteenth-century immigrant-built cathedral from “Saint Patrick’s Cathedral” to “the Cathedral of Saint Patrick.”
b Castrillon Hoyos’s exact words were “The language used [by the questioner, i.e., English] is interesting. This by itself is an X-ray of the problem.” He went on to blame the pedophilia crisis not on the church but on society’s “pan-sexuality and sexual licentiousness”; and in Vatican circles the term anglo sassone (Anglo-Saxon) is practically a synonym for (to their way of thinking) sick sexual practices. But the cardinal has a history of intervening on behalf of clerical child molesters (see Jason Berry and Gerald Renner, Vows of Silence: The Abuse of Power in the Papacy of John Paul II, pp. 232–35).
Notes and Sources
First, a word about the title of this book. The “mysteries” are not the mysteries of modern detective fiction. Our word mysteries derives from the Greek mystēria, originally a reference to the secret rites performed in pagan cults, especially the rites of Demeter, goddess of grain, which were conducted at Eleusis and to which yearly pilgrimages were organized from Athens. These rites were kept so effectively secret that to this day no one can be certain what was involved in their execution. Classical Greek Christians (apart from the whispering Gnostics) were resolutely opposed to such religious secrets: they wanted everything out in the open. And yet they called their own rites mystēria because they viewed them with the same exalted, trance-like awe in which the mysteries of Demeter were conducted. Mystery, therefore, became the word in the Christian East for what we in the West would name sacrament. These words once covered more experiences than we might allow for them today. The worship of the Virgin Mary was a sacramental mystery, as was the vowing of a nun, as was almost any broadly symbolic action—Francis presenting himself naked before Assisi’s cathedral, Giotto making a painting of that scene—carried out with ritual dignity.
As has been the case in the preceding volumes in this series, the bibliographical notes that follow are not intended as a complete list of everything I consulted, only of those sources I found most helpful and which I imagine an enterprising reader might be interested in consulting. Secondo me, there is no single work that gives one a more intense and extensive understanding of the Middle Ages than Sigrid Undset’s astonishing three-volume novel Kristin Lavransdatter, set in Norway in the first half of the fourteenth century and covering the life of one woman from birth to death. It has recently been republished (1997–2000) by Penguin in a much improved translation by Tiina Nunnally. If an interested reader were to undertake but one more study of things medieval, Undset is your woman. Her other medieval novels, The Master of Hestviken, a tetralogy, and Gunnar’s Daughter, are almost as masterful.
In keeping my bearings, I found two atlases especially useful: Colin McEvedy’s The New Penguin Atlas of Medieval History (1992), simply laid out and well seasoned by its salty commentary, and Rosamond McKitterick’s less focused but quite valuable Atlas of the Medieval World (Oxford, 200
4), a work of many hands and more than one point of view. Two encyclopedias provided excellent checklists: Norman Cantor’s one-volume Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages (New York, 1999), up-to-date but oddly selective; and The New Catholic Encyclopedia, second edition (2003), a fifteen-volume affair with supplements, whose bias is far more evident in its title than in its generally balanced and exhaustive entries. One of the best new histories of the period is Europe in the High Middle Ages (Penguin, 2001) by William Chester Jordan, though three series—The Short Oxford History of Europe, The Short Oxford History of Italy, and The Short Oxford History of France—are also helpful.
I found especially useful two books on intellectual history. The first of these, Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition, 400–1400 (Yale, 1997) by Marcia L. Colish, concerns, as its title suggests, the Middle Ages themselves. It is both encyclopedic and balanced. The second, Inventing the Middle Ages (Morrow, 1991) by Norman F. Cantor, traces the twentieth-century reaction against the negative view of the Middle Ages that was propagated during the Renaissance. It is selective, quirky, and subjective.