CRISTO RAUL.ORG '

THE UNIVERSAL HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY

FROM JUSTINIAN TO LUTHER. AD 518-1517

CHAPTER XVI.

LATER MEDIEVAL PIETY

IN the period of nearly five hundred years which elapsed between the separation of Rome and Constantinople and the outbreak of the Reformation there was not any great addition to the fundamental dogmas of the Church. The three creeds known as the Apostles’, the Nicene, and the Quicumque vult had gathered up the results of the Church's conflicts with heresy from the days of the early Gnostics to those of Nestorius, and defined the teaching of the New Testament concerning the Incarnation and the Trinity. Closely connected with the doctrine of the Person of Christ was the doctrine of the Eucharist, and in 1215 the Western Church at the Lateran Council accepted the term transubstantiation as describing the change effected by the consecration of the Eucharistic bread and wine. In the meantime new efforts were made to explain how the work of Christ was to be interpreted and the fruit of that work applied. The Atonement was studied with new interest, and St. Anselm's book explaining the redemptive and propitiatory nature of Christ's self-oblation shed light on an essential element in the doctrine of the Bible. On this, and many other subjects, Rome had made no authoritative utterance, although the doctrine of the Pope's infallibility had already been affirmed by St. Thomas Aquinas. But there existed a great area of religious practice and custom, good and evil, sanctioned and sometimes actively encouraged by the leaders of the Church, and made authoritative by papal permission.

One of the best features of new thought and new movement in piety is the fresh love for Jesus Christ as Man, and gratitude for His Passion. His Godhead is understood through His manhood, and the great hymns of this period seem indeed to be a 'new song' of His redeemed. The poignant verses of Thomas of Celano which describe the day of Judgment have a note of pathos which is repeated in other and more joyous hymns. In England we are fortunate in possessing excellent translations of many of these hymns, and the hold which even these translations have gained upon the affections of the people is a proof that religious taste, like other tastes, can be educated. Probably to a Benedictine abbess we are indebted for the lines:

Jesu! the hope of souls forlorn!

How good to them for sin that mourn!

To them that seek Thee, 0 how kind!

But what art Thou to them that find?!

Bernard of Cluny (and Morlas) has gained access to modern hearts with the hymn containing the words:

Brief life is here our portion,

Brief sorrow, short-lived care;

The life that knows no ending,

The tearless life, is there.

Of the Eucharistic hymns of St. Thomas Aquinas it is impossible to say which is most popular or most deserves to be popular. But the essence of them all is to be found in the lines:

Bone pastor, panis vere,

Iesu, nostri miserere,

Tu nos paste, nos tuere,

Tu nos bona fac videre,

in terra viventium.

It should be noted that in the earlier Middle Ages secular poetry retained the old classical metres. But in the twelfth century the Latin secular lyrics of love and spring, lyrics with a wonderful command of rhyme and versification, owe their form to the rhymed verses employed in the services of the Church.

One of the latest and best products of medieval English piety is the Jesus Psalter, a long pathetic litany ending with the words “0 Jesus, let me frequently and attentively consider, that whatsoever I gain, if I lose Thee, all is lost; and whatever I lose, if I gain Thee, all is gained”. It was for many generations printed in English Roman Catholic prayer books, such as Challoner's Garden of the Soul.

The practice of carving or painting the wounded heart of Jesus, together with His wounded hands and feet, has left many traces in this country; the five wounds are on the banner of Marian times preserved in St. John's College, Oxford, and on a shield of stone in the University church.

With this devotion to the Passion of Christ there inevitably arose a deeper feeling of sympathy with His mother:

At the Cross her station keeping

Stood the mournful mother weeping

Close to Jesus at the last.

The hymn Stabat Mater came from Italy, but in England as well as Italy men remembered 'Our Lady of Pity' holding in her arms the lifeless body of her divine Son. This new feeling of tenderness knew no frontiers of race. Artists carried it from Italy to Russia, where it had already been in some degree anticipated. The mother of God is no longer painted as merely interceding or showing her Son to the worshipper. She holds her Child with the devotion of one who sadly guards a treasure which is threatened; and He consoles her with the pressure of His tiny hand or cheek. In all this the art of Novgorod and Moscow added something to the art of perishing Byzantium.

The 'Hail Mary', combining the salutations offered by the angel and by St. Elizabeth to the Virgin mother, had been recited before the thirteenth century. But not until the sixteenth century do we find the additional words, 'holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen'. The English Necessary Doctrine and Erudition for any Christian Man of 1543 simply gives 'Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, Blessed art thou among women: and blessed is the fruit of thy womb'. In the thirteenth century it was already a pious custom in some places to recite a prayer in the evening at the time when the curfew bell was tolled. This developed into the 'Angelus' repeated at morning, noon, and night, and it is said that Elizabeth, queen of Henry VII of England, applied to Pope Sixtus IV for indulgences to be granted to those who said the Angelus. The rosary with its many Paters and Ayes grew in popularity in the fifteenth century, thanks to the zeal of the Dominicans; but it had been employed in some form by the Premonstratensians and Cistercians at an earlier date. The feast of the Conception of the Blessed Virgin, on December the 8th or 9th, and that of her Presentation in the Temple on November the 21st, had a somewhat romantic history. Observed by the Greeks, they were brought to England before the Norman conquest and certainly celebrated at Canterbury and Winchester. Both disappeared under Norman rule, and both began a new lease of life in Western Christendom in the thirteenth century. The observance of the festival of the Conception was complicated by the questions as to whether, and in what sense, Mary was conceived 'immaculate', free from all stain of original sin. This doctrine, opposed by St. Anselm, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Bonaventura, and St. Thomas Aquinas, was warmly defended by the Franciscans, and in 483 a bull of Pope Sixtus IV forbade Christians to describe as heretics the persons who defended it. It was only declared to be a dogma 'divinely revealed' by Pope Pius IX in 1854.

The festival of St. Joseph is found in a Roman calendar of the fifteenth century, but there was no widespread veneration of this saint. In the pictures of Christ enthroned, the old custom of placing, not St. Joseph, but the Baptist, with the Virgin mother, nearest to the throne, still remained.

The cults of the saints, and the pilgrimages to their shrines, did at least make the ordinary Christian feel that he belonged to the family of God's friends and the moral heroes of Christendom. But it was disfigured by great superstition. And Rome never undertook the drastic measures which were demanded by the naïve and childish customs of the people who owned her sway. In one diocese after another this or that reputed saint of the most doubtful authenticity was venerated; the ignorance of the people and the carelessness of the bishops neglected to sift or to check such practices. It is a consolation to find that in this matter St. Anselm showed an energy which deserved to be more widely imitated than it was. The English Homily against Peril of Idolatry says in rebuke of the popular saint-worship, “All diseases have their special saints, as gods the curers of them; the pocks St. Roch, the falling-evil St. Cornelius, the toothache St. Apollin, &c. Neither do beasts and cattle lack their gods with us; for St. Loy is the horse-leech, and Anthony the swineherd, &c. Where is God's providence and due honor in the mean season?” In the second half of the twelfth century the popes began to reserve to themselves the right to canonize. But the right of bishops to beatify a servant of God was not definitely taken from them until the seventeenth century.

During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the doctrine and system of administering the sacraments became more and more carefully defined in the West. Great differences of opinion existed as to the number of the sacraments, even where there was substantial agreement as to the nature of the seven different rites to which the name of 'sacrament' was eventually given. Paschasius Radbertus (d. 868) had only acknowledged two: Baptism, including Confirmation which was anciently administered in close connection with Baptism, and the Lord's Supper. Rabanus Maurus reckoned Confirmation as a separate sacrament; and counted two sacraments in the Eucharist, one of the body and the other of the blood of Christ. Hugo of St. Victor still used the word in the wide vague sense which it bore in earlier times. He reckoned three sacraments as necessary to salvation, Baptism, Confirmation, and the Eucharist; another class consisted of those which were merely aids to salvation, such as sprinkling with holy water, extreme unction, and marriage, while the ordination of priests was a sacrament necessary for a particular calling. Peter Lombard fixed the number of sacraments as seven, Baptism, Confirmation, the Lord's Supper, Penance, Extreme Unction, Ordination, and Marriage. This number was authoritatively sanctioned by the Council of Florence in AD 1439 and is accepted in the East as well as in the West. It had been accepted by a synod of London in 1237, which mentioned seven 'principal sacraments'.

Alexander of Hales, the celebrated English Franciscan School-man (d. 1245), gave special prominence to Baptism and the Eucharist, as alone instituted by Christ, a view which is retained in the English Thirty-nine Articles and other documents of the Reformation. St. Thomas Aquinas gave this rank to all the seven. But he drew a distinction between sacraments necessary to salvation and those not necessary. He regarded Baptism, the Lord's Supper, and Penance as necessary to salvation, without repudiating the theory of Peter Lombard that the desire to make a confession of mortal sins to a priest was sufficient if the actual confession was impossible. The fourth Lateran Council, AD 1215, made confession of sins to a priest necessary once a year, before the Easter Communion. But the practice of very frequent confession appears to have been very rare before the Reformation. A very desirable change began to make itself felt with regard to the celebration of Marriage. It had been the custom from very primitive times for the priest to pronounce a blessing on the marriage of a Christian pair, and from the ninth century onwards in the East this blessing was required by the State for all legal marriages. In the West the 'mutual consent' of the two contracting parties in the presence of a witness or witnesses was recognized as constituting a legal marriage. The second Lateran Council, AD 1139, and the fourth, required that the banns of those intending to marry should be published in church, but a marriage without the presence of a priest was recognized as valid by Rome until the sixteenth century.

Extreme unction, the 'last anointing', i.e. of the sick or dying, gradually assumed a somewhat new character. The earlier prayers for this rite show that the anointing was originally given for the healing of the body of the sick person, as is implied in St. James v. 14. But at this period it was taught that it was administered primarily for the removal of the 'remains of sins' left after baptism and confession and absolution. Hence there came a tendency to postpone the administration of extreme unction until the sick person was evidently dying, a practice which is opposed to the meaning of the prayers recited.

The sacrament of the altar occupied so prominent a place in the theology and worship of the Middle Ages that it calls for some special attention in even the briefest history. The Eucharist may be considered as both a sacrament and a sacrifice. Strange as it may seem, there was in the Middle Ages comparatively little discussion as to the meaning attached to the word sacrifice in this connection. In Paschasius, in St. Ivo of Chartres, and Hildebert of Tours we find a parallel drawn between the sacrificial action of the Church in the Eucharist and the continuous propitiatory work of the ascended Christ on the throne of His Father. But such famous Schoolmen as Peter Lombard and St. Thomas Aquinas treated this subject very meagrely. And the result of such neglect was the growth of ideas which threatened the primitive Christian view of the unique character and infinite merit of Christ's death, the Mass being regarded as almost a repetition of His Passion. Hence came at the Reformation those violent controversies which caused attempts to formulate the doctrine, attempts made in an atmosphere which was ill-fitted for the consideration of a mystery so affecting. But though the Schoolmen neglected the doctrine of the Eucharistic sacrifice, they were greatly occupied with discussion of the nature of Christ's presence under the forms of bread and wine. In earlier writers there can be discerned two distinct modes of regarding this presence. Some writers, like St. Cyril of Jerusalem, laid most stress upon the change by which the bread and wine became the body and blood of Christ at the prayer of consecration pronounced by the priest. Other writers, like St. Chrysostom and Pope Gelasius, laid stress upon the fact that in the sacrament so consecrated the union of the outward with the inward, the nature of Christ's body and His blood with the nature of the bread and the wine, resembled the union of the human and the divine elements in Christ's Person. These two views were sometimes combined. But in time the former came rather to submerge than to embrace the latter. And in opposition to the teaching of Berengarius of Tours and his predecessor Ratramnus there came a common adoption of the word transubstantiation as the fittest word to express the change of the elements into the body and blood of Christ. The word occurs in works of doubtful authenticity ascribed to St. Peter Damian (d. 1071) and Hildebert of Tours (d. 1134), and it was formally adopted at the Lateran Council in 1215. It was a word which was associated with the philosophical tenet then current that everything possesses an invisible substance apart from the accidents of shape, color, taste, weight, &c., which are discerned by the senses. Therefore it was taught that while the accidents of bread and wine after they are consecrated remain exactly as they were before, the substance of the elements is changed into the body and blood of Christ.

The Roman Mass had supplanted the other Western liturgies except the Ambrosian rite in the Archdiocese of Milan, and the Mozarabic rite retained in a few churches in Spain. But it must be remembered that even in Rome itself there was no such thing as a purely Roman missal. Everywhere there were some traces of the impact of Irish and Gallic customs, such as the insertion of a memento of the dead at every Mass. There was also considerable variety in the preparatory prayers said at the altar steps, and at the offertory and the communion of the priest. This can be seen at once by comparing the Roman rite with that of Salisbury, which was that most widely used in England. Generally speaking, it may be said that the more elaborate, emotional, and scenic elements in public worship did not originate in Rome, but in France, Germany, and England.

In England a series of prayers especially intended for worshippers was provided in the Lay Folk's Mass Book. The original seems to have been composed in French by an Anglo-Norman of the twelfth century. The existing English translations are of various dates, and illustrate the difference between the more archaic form of Yorkshire English and the later Yorkshire and Midland English. The reader is bidden to say the Pater Noster where nothing else is provided. There is a good paraphrase of the Creed, accurate enough except that 'the communion of saints' is misinterpreted as the 'house or sacrament of Christ's Body and Blood. Some of the prayers, in spite of the roughness of their metre, are of great beauty.

A few lines are here transcribed in a slightly modernized form. At the Offertory:

Jesu, that wast in Bethlem bore,

Three kings once kneeled Thee before,

And offered gold, myrrh, and incense;

Thou disdained not their presents,

But didst guide them all the three

Home again to their countree.

So our offerings that we offer,

And our prayers that we proffer,

Take them, Lord, unto thy praise,

And be our help through all our days.

At the time of the consecration the worshipper is to pray without dread, kneeling and holding up both his hands in the ancient form of supplication. He should pray in his own words, but if he cannot find words of his own then he may say:

Loved be Thou, King,

And blessed be Thou, King,

For all thy gifts good,

That for me spilt thy blood

And died upon the rood.

Thou give me grace to sing

The song of thy loving.

The festival of Corpus Christi in honor of the sacrament of the altar appears to have first been observed at Liege in 1246. The fine service for the festival is the work of St. Thomas Aquinas. The practice of carrying the Eucharist in processions apparently dates from the eleventh century. It began as a part of the ritual for Palm Sunday, as is shown in the missals of Rouen and Hereford. It is also prescribed for that day in Lanfranc's statutes for Canterbury Cathedral. The rite known as Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament, in which the sacrament is exposed on the altar in a monstrance for the veneration of the faithful was known in northern Germany at the beginning of the sixteenth century. In the north of Europe the sacrament was reserved for the sick in a vessel of precious metal suspended over the altar, or in a separate richly ornamented receptacle, which in Italy and in Scotland was usually made in the north wall of the sanctuary. The latter practice, and not the former, is implied by canon law. In spite of much external devotion to the Eucharist, the practice of receiving the sacrament became less frequent. Probably it was never very frequent in England, for the Venerable Bede, in writing to Egbert, expresses his regret that the English do not follow the example of Rome, where multitudes communicated every Sunday. By the period of the Reformation it had become the ordinary practice, both in England and in Rome, to partake of the Holy Communion only once a year. By the end of the Middle Ages the chalice was not received by any but the priest who celebrated, and this rule applied almost everywhere to both clerical and lay assistants. The practice began in England about 1150, but only made way slowly. In Rome communion was still given in both kinds to communicants on certain occasions as late as the fifteenth century.

Any mention of the sacramental system as it existed during the later Middle Ages must comprise an account of the indulgences or 'pardons' granted to the faithful.

At an early period of Church history it was in the power of the bishops to remit some part of the public discipline required in the case of penitent offenders. Later, when the so-called Penitentials were read and circulated, the severe penitential exercises enumerated in these books were sometimes modified or commuted. Fasting, for instance, was sometimes replaced by the recitation of psalms or the payment of a sum of money. Then came the indulgence strictly so-called. It was taught to be the remission of the temporal punishment due to sin, the guilt of which was removed by absolution.

The penitent was taught that though he was forgiven as Moses and David were forgiven, yet, like them, he must be prepared to suffer some temporal punishment. He must make amends to God, whose majesty had been outraged. If he did not pay to God this satisfaction while he lived, he must after death, before he entered heaven, pay it by suffering the torments of purgatory. It was the payment of an expiation by bitter suffering. But this awful punishment might be mitigated or escaped. The Church had an inexhaustible treasure, not only in the merits of Christ but also in the works which the saints and the faithful have done over and above what was necessary for their salvation. Part of this over plus might be credited to the repentant sinner. At first these indulgences were only a partial remission of punishment; but as early as the end of the eleventh century Pope Urban II granted a plenary indulgence to all who took part in the crusade. And beginning at the year 1300 the popes gave plenary jubilee indulgences, first every hundred, then every fifty, and finally every twenty-five years. To gain such an indulgence it was necessary to confess one's sins and visit the basilicas of St. Peter and St. Paul in Rome. In the fifteenth century this indulgence was extended to those who could not visit Rome in person, and in the same century it was decided that indulgences could be made applicable to souls already in purgatory. In 1476 Pope Sixtus IV wrote that if parents and friends who wished to help those who were exposed “to the fire of purgatory for the expiation of sins' would pay a certain sum of money” for the repair of a church at Xanten, he willed that the money should avail per modum suffragii for the souls aforesaid. The donation was to be considered as a kind of recommendation to the Almighty for a plenary remission of punishment. This is the first known instance of an indulgence being applied to the souls in purgatory, and it speedily led to some of the worst scandals in Church history.

Even as early as the thirteenth century serious abuses arose from the practice of giving indulgences in return for a money payment, and long before the Reformation the 'pardoners' who distributed these indulgences were a favorite target for satirists. When money was needed for a charitable purpose, application was made to the Pope to grant an indulgence, and agents were employed to travel through the country, publish the indulgence, and solicit the alms of the faithful. Little or no care was taken in the selection of these agents, and so long as the money came in satisfactorily, the authorities were loath to scrutinize too narrowly the methods employed by their deputies. Grindal, in a sermon preached in 1564, when he was Bishop of London, says, “Some redeemed for money great plenty of indulgences from Rome, and he that had the greatest plenty of them to be cast with him into his grave when he was buried (which I myself have seen done) was counted the best prepared for death”. This is no stronger than what was said by the great Oxford chancellor Thomas Gascoigne, who about 1450 wrote, “Sinners say nowadays: I care not how many or how great sins I commit before God, for I most easily and quickly get plenary remission of any guilt or penalty whatever by absolution and indulgence granted to me from the Pope, whose writing and grant I have bought for 4d. or 6d. or for a game of tennis” .

The system of the seven sacraments embraced the life of man from the cradle to the grave, securing to man communion with God and with the unseen world. But it also bound together the two different forms of the Christian life, the life of the monk and the life of the Christian, whether clerical or lay, living in the world. In earlier times, especially in the East, there was a tendency towards a sharp and harmful separation between the life of the monk, the life in the desert or in the monastery, and the life of the city and the parish. There is some truth in the sarcastic remark of the Russian philosopher that, though the monk in the desert and the charioteer in the circus were both Orthodox, the first was a Monophysite and the second a Nestorian. In the Middle Ages monk and priest and layman were closely bound together by the same sacraments and to a considerable extent by the same worship. This worship was not only sacramental worship. The result of the monastic daily offices was that the secular priests had also their daily offices as a matter of strict obligation. And in England the laity, at least on Sundays, attended both Mattins and Evensong as well as Mass. To hear Mass and neglect Mattins was even regarded as a mark of Lollardy.

The greatest devotional masterpiece written in the Middle Ages is the book called the Imitation of Christ, written by Thomas a Kempis, who finished it in 1441. He was a member of the society called the Brethren of the Common Life, founded by Gerard Groot, a native of Deventer in Holland, in the preceding century. Gerard, when living a life of ease at Cologne, was converted by a devout Carthusian, and himself began to work as an itinerant preacher. Gerard was aided by Florentius Radewyn and the great Dutch mystic Ruysbroek. They founded little societies of men who lived together, and observed the rules of poverty, chastity, and obedience, but were bound by no vow, so that any one might return to the world if he so desired. They supported themselves by their own hands, unlike the mendicant friars, who lived by the alms of the faithful. The first society was that founded at Windesheim near Deventer, and one of its many daughter societies was that of Mount St. Agnes, Agnetenberg, near Zwolle. All the houses were homes of quiet industry, and the brethren helped to teach in the town grammar schools. Thomas, who was born at Kempen near Krefeld, was taught by the brethren at Deventer, and, when his school days were over, was received at Mount St. Agnes, where he lived until the day of his death, July the 25th, 1471. He copied books, wrote little treatises, taught novices, and left behind him a convincing proof that the right way to help others to be good is to become a better man oneself. As the Order of the Brethren of the Common Life mainly supported themselves by the copying and sale of manuscripts, the invention of printing deprived them of their chief means of gaining a livelihood, and they did not survive the Reformation. But the religious spirit which created the Order should be reckoned among the greatest distinctions of Holland. It combined fervor with sobriety, the love of God with the service of man.

The Imitation of Christ is perhaps nearer to the Gospel and the First Epistle of St. John than any book written since the age of the apostles. From the beginning to the end it breathes with a manly love of Jesus Christ. The writer is a true mystic, who has learnt to see in everything 'a mirror of life'. Unlike the pseudo-mystic, he neither tries nor hopes to lose his own individuality, and in seeking for union with his Lord he knows that the worshipper can meet God only where God wills to meet him. Hence his love of the sacraments and his readiness to work and to suffer as though 'the trivial round, the common task' were themselves almost a sacrament of peace. He has no tricks of style, no subtleties, nothing but his certainty that the Catholic life is friendship with Jesus, and his power to exhort us to bear the cross with courage. No one who has read the book year by year has doubted that Thomas wrote the truth when he said, “I had rather be poor for thy sake: than rich without Thee”. And few who know it have failed to find in it a guide to that “cloudless day of eternity, which no night obscures: whose never setting radiance is the supreme Truth; day ever joyful, ever secure”.

Whatever sanctity may be discovered in other lands, England presents us with two pictures of later medieval piety which are of the purest beauty. One is to be seen in the writings of the Lady Julian of Norwich, the other in Chaucer's description of the poor parson of a town parish.

Julian, who lived in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, was a nun and anchorite who dwelt in a cell adjoining the church of Conisford near Norwich. With little learning derived from books, she possessed not only a deep religious and philosophical insight, but also strong ethical qualities and an exquisite literary taste. Her conviction that nature and grace are really at one brought with it both a keen hatred of evil and an abounding hopefulness. Julian is a true lover of God, and in her symbolism all that is best in human affection and loyalty is delicately reflected. The solitary nun has in her heart the love of mother and the love of child, the devotion of a faithful servant and of a valiant knight.

After Dante, Chaucer is the greatest of medieval poets. And in his supreme work he has given us a characterization of a parish priest which displays to us the qualities which the poet as a Christian and an Englishman admired in a shepherd of souls. The portrait is no doubt ideal, and it is deliberately introduced as a foil to the portraits of other and less worthy representatives of religion. But the “povre Persoun of a toun” is no figment; he is a true man intelligible in his simple goodness, a goodness which is sometimes miscalled prosaic by those who are blind to the romance of common duties.

But riche he was of holy thoght and werk,

He was also a lerned man, a clerk,

That Cristes gospel trewely wolde preche;

His parisshens devoutly wolde he teche.

Wyd was his parisshe, and houses fer a-sonder

But he ne lafte nat, for reyn ne thonder,

In siknes nor in meschief, to visyte,

The ferreste in his parisshe, muche and lyte,

Up-on his feet, and in his hand a staf.

This noble ensample to his sheep he yaf,

That first he wroghte, and afterward he taughte;

Out of the gospel he tho wordes caughte;

And this figure he added eek ther-to,

That if gold ruste, what shal iren do?

Chaucer's sporting monk who loved “the newe world” and the friar who wantonly “lipsed” his English, belong to the pageant of the past, “the povre Persoun” is alive today.

CHAPTER XVII.

SCHISMS AND REFORMS