From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800-1200

FROM JUDGMENT TO PASSION

FRONTISPIECE

Crucifixion with the Virgin Mary and John. Arundel Psalter (Winchester: New Minster, mid-eleventh century), Psalm 1. London: British Library, MS Arundel 60, fol. 12v.

Courtesy of The British Library

FROM JUDGMENT TO PASSION

Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200

RACHEL FULTON

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK

Generous financial support toward the publication of this book has been provided by The Valparaiso Project on the Education and Formation of People in Faith, a project of The Lilly Endowment, Inc.

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Copyright © 2002 Columbia University Press

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E-ISBN 978-0-231-50076-0

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fulton, Rachel.

From judgment to passion : devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 / Rachel Fulton.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

ISBN 0–231–12550–X (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 0–231–12551–8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Jesus Christ—Cult—Europe. 2. Mary, Blessed Virgin, Saint—Cult—Europe. 3. Europe—Church History—600–1500. 4. Europe—Religious life and customs. I. Title.

BT590.C85 F85 2002

274'.03—dc21                      2002025696

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.

For Jonathan and Rush

CONTENTS

List of Plates

Acknowledgments

A Note to the Reader

INTRODUCTION

PART ONE Christus Patiens

1.    HISTORY, CONVERSION, AND THE SAXON CHRIST

Converting the Pagans

Translating the Savior

The Miracle of God’s Speaking

The Paschasian Christ

2.    APOCALYPSE, REFORM, AND THE SUFFERING SAVIOR

Waiting for the Apocalypse

The Coming of Christ in Judgment

Signed with the Cross

A Priesthood Apart

The Whole Church Believes

3.    PRAYING TO THE CRUCIFIED CHRIST

Adoring God on the Cross

Writing on the Tablets of the Heart

Why God Became Man

PART TWO Maria Compatiens

INTRODUCTION

4.    PRAYING TO THE MOTHER OF THE CRUCIFIED JUDGE

Grieving Without Tears

"O Glorious Domina"

My Heart Is Sick with Love

5.    THE SEAL OF THE MOTHER BRIDE

Impressing the Soft Wax of the Memory

The Sweet Songs of the Drama

I Will Be a Wall for Them

Queenly Favors

6.    THE VOICE OF MY BELOVED, KNOCKING

Figures and Shadows

I Sleep and My Heart Keeps Watch

The Song of the Incarnation

My Belly Trembled at His Touch

Reading and Singing

7.    ONCE UPON A TIME…

A Bride Foreseen

Trumpets of God

A Modest and Spiritual Fabula

Love of the Flesh

Come, My Chosen One

8.    COMMORIENS, COMMORTUA, CONSEPULTA

John 11:35: "Et Lacrymatus Est Iesus"

Scrutinizing Lofty Matters

The Song of the Virgin Mother to the Lamb

Our Bed Is Flowery

Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Index of Scriptural Citations

Index of Manuscripts Cited

General Index

LIST OF PLATES

FRONTISPIECE: Crucifixion with the Virgin Mary and John. Arundel Psalter (Winchester: New Minster, mid-eleventh century), Psalm 1. London: British Library, MS Arundel 60, fol. 12v. Courtesy of the British Library, London.

PLATE 1: The Gero Crucifix (c. 975–999), Cologne Cathedral. Courtesy of Rheinisches Bildarchiv, Köln.

PLATE 2: The Virgin and Child enthroned, with angels, prophets, monks, and nuns (c. 1117–1139). Illustration for Anselm of Canterbury’s Orationes 5–7 ad sanctam Mariam as collected for the Countess Matilda of Tuscany. Admont: Stiftsbibliothek, MS 289, fol. 21v. Courtesy of Benediktinerstift, Stiftsbibliothek, Admont.

PLATE 3: Seal of Worcester Cathedral (1178). Courtesy of the Society of Antiquaries of London.

PLATE 4: La Vierge de Dom Rupert (c. 1149–1158). Courtesy of Musée Curtius de Liège.

PLATE 5: Apse mosaic (c. 1140–1143), Santa Maria in Trastevere, Rome. Courtesy of Art Resource, New York.

PLATE 6: "Hodie gloriosa semper uirgo Maria celos ascendit." Illustration for the Office of the Assumption, Liber matutinalis (1180), copied by Johannes and Uldaricus of Admont for the nuns of Admont. Admont: Stiftsbibliothek, MS 18, fol. 163r. Courtesy of Benediktinerstift, Stiftsbibliothek, Admont.

PLATE 7: Virgin and Child (early thirteenth century). Bible, illustration for the Song of Songs. London: British Library, MS Add. 41751, fol. 18. Courtesy of The British Library, London.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The debts of gratitude to both people and institutions that I have accumulated over the years of researching and writing this book are very great, and it is with pleasure that I now have the opportunity to acknowledge at least some of them here.

My warmest thanks go first to my teachers: at Amarillo High School, Michael Mitchusson, Gary Biggers, Charley and Janice Hargrave, who not only inspired in me a love of Latin and history but also on actual and imaginative journeys through Europe first introduced me to those images of Christ and Mary that I have been struggling these many years to understand; at Rice University, Sharon Farmer and Werner Kelber, whose thought-provoking courses on medieval religiosity and the historical Jesus showed me the way to begin; and at Cambridge University, Christopher Brooke, who encouraged me in my first reading of William’s commentary long before it was clear even to me what could be made of it. At Columbia University, Robert Somerville, Malcolm Bean, and Nina Garsoïan gave me the tools with which to proceed, and Joan Ferrante and Milton McGatch were careful readers of my dissertation. Special thanks are reserved, however, for one teacher in particular, Caroline Walker Bynum, who was there for me even before I became her graduate student, and has been there for me ever since. It is difficult to express how much her example and guidance have meant to me, although it is enough to say that there have been times that, without it, I am not sure I would have had the courage to go on. My intellectual debts to her will be apparent throughout this book; my spiritual debts to her go even deeper, beyond words.

The writing of this book was generously supported by a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies for 1998–1999. It was begun that same year in the idyllic environs of the National Humanities Center with fellowship support from the Lilly Endowment, and I am deeply grateful to the staff there for their enthusiasm and support. Librarians Alan Tuttle, Eliza Robertson, and Jean Houston supplied me with every book I could possibly need, allowing me precious time to write and even more precious time for conversation. Of the wholly wonderful class of fellows for the year, I am particularly indebted to Malcolm Barber, Nikki Beisel, Bob Bireley, Melissa Bullard, Annemarie Weyl Carr, Jaroslav Folda, William Harris, Bob Kendrick, Tony La Vopa, Jonathan Levin, Alex Owen, Eugene Rogers, Vance Smith, and John Watanabe for much encouragement and advice. I am likewise indebted to Peter Kaufmann and the other members of the Lilly Collegium on Religion and the Humanities for providing a stimulating context in which to debate and create. Dick Pfaff, Catherine Peyroux, and Karen Kletter all in different ways made the year a special one. I am also grateful to Jane Burns for the opportunity to present some of my work to the Medieval Studies Group at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill.

At the University of Chicago, I thank the librarians and staff of the Joseph Regenstein Library, the J. David Greenstone Memorial Fund of the Social Sciences Division, and my research assistants Robin O’Sullivan and Kathleen Self for much needed support to bring the book to completion. Bernard McGinn and Julius Kirshner both read the first two chapters at an early stage, and although I am certain that there are still points at which they will disagree with me, it was their advice that helped me see how best to make the argument that I wanted to make. My colleagues in the Department of History have contributed to this book in more ways than I think they may realize; likewise, the graduate students and faculty who have made up the Medieval Studies Workshop these past seven years. I am grateful to them all for their confidence and interest in my work, and for their unflagging example of excellence in their own.

Of the many colleagues, friends, and family members who have helped me in the research and writing of this book in more ways than I can count, both big and small, I would like to thank especially the following: Anna Sapir Abulafia, Michael Allen, Ann Astell, Alison Beach, Anne-Marie Bouché, Diane Brady, Lisa Brawley, Anne Clark, Emma Cownie, Constantin Fasolt, Margot Fassler, Robert Fulton Jr., the late Margaret Gibson, Sean Gilsdorf, Jonathan Hall, Jeffrey Hamburger, Phyllis Jestice, Richard Kieckhefer, Eloe Kingma, Adam Kosto, Ann Kuttner, Mark Miller, Mary Minty, Karl Morrison, Sara Paretsky, Morgan Powell, Anne Walters Robertson, Barbara Rosenwein, Richard Saller, Richard Strier, Denys Turner, Christina Von Nolcken, and Grover Zinn. I am particularly grateful to Vanessa Paumen, Marcus Peter, and Johann Tomaschek for help in acquiring photographs and to Jacques Dalarun for help in tracking down Metz 245. Special thanks are reserved to Karen Duys, Ann Kuzdale, and Lucy Pick, who, as loyal members of CAMS, brought many hours of happy and fruitful conversation to what would have otherwise been an all too lonely endeavor.

I am grateful to my editors at Columbia University Press, Wendy Lochner, Ann Miller, Jennifer Crewe, and Anthony Chiffolo, for taking on such an enormous book with good cheer and great enthusiasm. And I owe many thanks to my readers for the press, E. Ann Matter and Barbara Newman, for the generosity and care with which they refereed my book.

Above all, I am grateful to my family. My parents, Robert Fulton and Nona Snyder Fulton, may not have always understood why I was so interested in the images and texts that I explore here, but they have been unfailing in their confidence that I would discover a way to explain why. My sister Rebecca shared with me that first trip to Europe, and she has been there with me many times since, as has my brother Robert, who together have shared with me in conversation and hope a dream of making, which is the very heart of devotion, and love. Most of all, however, I am grateful to my husband, Jonathan, and to my son, Rush. Their love has sustained me through nights darker than I thought I could bear and has brought me time and again back out into the light. They alone know what it cost to write this book; my debt to them is unpayable, beyond measure.

A NOTE TO THE READER

For medieval Christians, the great mystery of the Incarnation was first and foremost linguistic: And the Word became flesh and lived among us (John 1:14). Somewhat surprisingly, at least for modern readers, this focus on God’s Word as flesh did not, however, translate into a conviction that that Word as recorded in the Scriptures was necessarily in any way fixed, that what was written as written was itself an accurate transcription of God’s speaking to be cited by preachers and exegetes verbatim and only verbatim. Rather, for medieval readers, the goal was always to discover the true meaning contained in the shell of the text. The letters themselves, even the order of the words, were less important than the spirit hidden behind them as by a veil. The exegetes’ task was to lift this veil and to look behind it for the mysteries concealed within. One of the most important consequences of this interpretive method—at least for the modern reader hoping to come to grips with the sources and tropes of medieval devotional literature—was an inspired disregard for what in later centuries would come to be regarded as the very foundation of scriptural citation: its normativity and its dependence on particular editions and translations. In monastic writings, this variability of citation was only further exacerbated (from a modern perspective) by the monks’ tendency to quote in their writings as often as not from memory. To complicate matters even further, the monks’ memories were typically stocked with the Scriptures not as they learned them reading in the cloister, but rather as they learned them singing the liturgy in the choir, and liturgical variants on the Scriptures were legion.

Readers familiar with critical editions of medieval texts and their bristling layers of notes will appreciate how hard it is to translate these citational vagaries into consistent references to one or another modern edition of the Scriptures while still retaining the sense intended by the medieval authors. In citing from Scripture, I have, therefore, compromised. For references to chapter and verse, I have relied upon Robert Weber’s edition of the Vulgate (Biblia sacra iuxta Vulgatam versionem, 4th ed. [Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft 1969, 1994]). For translations of scriptural passages, I have relied upon the Douay-Rheims-Challoner translation of the Vulgate (The Holy Bible: The Catholic Bible, Douay-Rheims Version [New York: Benziger Brothers, 1941; first published 1750]) in conjunction with the New Revised Standard Version (The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books, eds. Bruce M. Metzger and Roland E. Murphy [New York: Oxford University Press, 1991, 1994]). I have tended to favor the latter version, it being the one that I grew up with in the Presbyterian church (and so fixed more firmly in my memory of the way the text ought to read), but I have referred to the former when it seemed better to preserve the text as the medieval authors remembered it. For translation of the Song of Songs (RSV Song of Solomon), I have also relied on E. Ann Matter, The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), pp. xvi–xxxv. In all instances, my goal in my translations has been to keep as close as possible to the texts as read and cited by the medieval exegetes; I have not, however, altered the translations I cite from modern authors, except when the sense of the original seemed to require it. I have marked all such passages in the notes.

For unto this are you called: because Christ also suffered for us, leaving you an example that you should follow in his steps.    —1 Peter 2:21

Be ye therefore followers of God, as most dear children: And walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us and hath delivered himself for us, an oblation and a sacrifice to God for an odour of sweetness.    —Ephesians 5:1–2

For let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: Who being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men, and in habit found as a man. He humbled himself, becoming obedient unto death, even to the death of the cross. For which cause, God also hath exalted him and hath given him a name which is above all names: That in the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those that are in heaven, on earth, and under the earth: And that every tongue should confess that the Lord Jesus Christ is in the glory of God the Father.     —Philippians 2:5–11

And Simeon blessed them and said to Mary his mother: Behold this child is set for the fall and for the resurrection of many in Israel and for a sign which shall be contradicted. And thy own soul a sword shall pierce, that, out of many hearts thoughts may be revealed.    —Luke 2:34–35

Introduction

This book sets out to explain the origins and initial development of a devotion at the heart of medieval European Christianity: the imitative devotion to Christ in his suffering, historical humanity and to his mother, Mary, in her compassionate grief. That this devotion to the crucified God-man, his grieving mother, and his tortured yet redemptive body and blood was at the heart of medieval European Christianity is hardly to be contested, as any visit to any European art museum or, indeed, to almost any medieval European church will attest. Why and how it became so is a question somewhat more difficult to answer—so difficult that it has rarely even been asked, at least by scholars, if not by their students (or by children).

The image that I recall best from this perspective was a life-size crucifix tucked away in a chapel by the cemetery of the Benedictine abbey of St. Peter in Salzburg, which I saw some twenty years ago on my first trip to Europe as a student. I cannot recall from this distance of time the details of the image, nor can I say when or in what style it was sculpted (it was not there when I returned a few years later, although it may have been returned since). What I do recall is the effect that it had on me as my eyes adjusted to the gloom in which it was shrouded: a feeling of sweetness, and of sorrow, of longing to be closer to the beauty of the man depicted so dying, and yet myself prevented from drawing closer by the iron bars closing the chapel off—a tomb indeed for a dying god. What was I to make of such an image, of such an effect?¹ I had seen similar images in Florence, where the museum of the Duomo exhibited a crucifix whose arms were stretched so tightly that its shoulders were being torn, redly, from their sockets. This image had produced not longing, but fear: terror that there could be such agony inflicted on human flesh, revulsion that pain could be the focus of such devotion. Was this a devotion to love or to pain? Where had it come from, and why?

The standard scholarly answer to at least the first part of this latter question, most famously articulated by R. W. Southern in the concluding chapter of his Making of the Middle Ages, is that it came from the monasteries—monasteries like St. Peter’s in Salzburg—where for centuries the practice of lectio divina, or sacred reading, had encouraged the monks to participate imaginatively in the events of Christ’s life and death as described in the Scriptures—events they chewed over (to borrow one of their favorite metaphors) and digested in the stomachs of their memory and brought forth, reincorporated, in their worship at the altar and in the choir. Scholarly opinion is less clear, however, on why this meditative reading practice, itself originally developed centuries earlier in the monasteries of late antiquity, should have brought forth the fruit of affective identity with the dying God-man and his grieving mother precisely when it did, that is, sometime in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, as the period of its ripening is usually styled. Likewise murky are the catalysts for this change. In the words of Professor Southern: It is possible too that the pioneers of medieval spirituality in the eleventh century did not so much initiate, as give way to a prevailing sentiment of pity and tenderness, which they interpreted and expressed in art and letters. It is possible that long before theory caught up with practice the sufferings of Christ had excited the pity of unlettered men, who knew nothing of the theology of Redemption which made pity irrelevant. This is something which we shall perhaps never know.²

Perhaps; and yet, I am convinced that it is not only possible but necessary to know more—if, that is, we are to understand what was to become of European Christian art, literature, culture, and society over the next five hundred or so years, not to mention the content and appeal of the devotion itself. Our problem from this perspective is as much a hermeneutical as it is a historical one: how to understand not only how but why this devotion to Christ came into being both when and where it did, along with its corollary devotions to the Eucharist and to Mary; how to understand, in other words, both the making and the meaning of this new thing—if, in fact, it was a new thing and not simply a becoming visible of something already there (as Southern suggested it might be). Our method, accordingly, must be likewise twinned, narrative as well as exegetical, concerned as much with causes and probabilities as with the meaning of images and texts, with the actions and motivations of human beings as with their artistic results.

Excess scholarly caution—often invoked at this point even by established scholars and elaborated by more junior ones in lengthy methodological introductions³—is, I believe, unwarranted. If (to paraphrase Freud) we cannot know men and women, their motives, or the nature of their souls, we are, even as scholars, human enough to attempt some understanding of their art and religion—of the verbal and visual images and signs through which they have attempted to communicate their motives and souls, both to their own contemporaries and to their God.⁴ This is not to say that we might not get it wrong, that we might not read too much of ourselves into the scattered traces of past lives that we call our historical record; nevertheless, I am equally convinced that to refuse the interpretive leap into the past (as Freud and many others after him have repeatedly insisted we should) is not only hermeneutically but also historiographically presumptive, not to say naive. It is to presume that we as historians have no access whatsoever to the emotions of love, fear, pity, compassion, pride, and remorse that motivated the production of these traces; it is to presume that human beings of the historical past are (were) so irredeemably Other that there is no possibility of empathy in our encounter with them other than of the most reductive kind (for example, through their social, political, and legal forms, or through their money). It is at the very least unfortunate that we have come so far in our scholarly reluctance to empathize that we often refuse even to attempt the imaginative reenactment (more properly, rethinking) of the past that R. G. Collingwood once characterized as the primary task of the historian.⁵ It is to my mind unthinkable that we should continue in this vein.

This book is a history; its purpose is to explain change. And to explain change, it will be necessary to inquire into motivations—the thoughts, ideals, anxieties, ambitions, and dreams that the men and women of the Middle Ages brought to the construction of their culture, especially their religion, and to their imaginings about God. To do so will take some care, and not a little time (thus the great length of the book). But if we succeed, even for a moment, in capturing what Augustine would call the ictus intelligentiae (the thought as it leaps from the mind⁶) of the human beings who were themselves the authors of their culture and imaginings, then, I am convinced, we shall be the richer for it, not only as historians but also, ourselves, as human beings.

The story I propose to tell here is—as Augustine insisted instructive stories should be—one of empathy. It is a story of the effort to identify empathetically with the God who so emptied himself as to become incarnate from a human woman and to die a humiliating death. It is a story of the art, literature, and liturgy through which medieval Christians attempted their mimesis of Christ and Mary’s compassionate and bodily pain. And it is a story of miracle and creation, history and time, purity and debt, experience and understanding, compassion and fear. Above all, however, it is a story of prayer.

It begins (chapter 1) in the ninth century, with the Carolingian effort to convert the pagan Saxons to Christianity. For this Germanic people, one of the greatest stumbling blocks to conversion was the sacrament of the Mass with its doctrinal claim that God’s Son Christ was present in truth or historically in the bread and wine on the altar (I refer, in particular, to Paschasius Radbertus’s De corpore et sanguine Domini and to the Old Saxon Gospel epic known as the Heliand). The story continues (chapters 2–4) in the early eleventh century with the radical revision of Christian history necessitated by the failure of Christ to return to earth in the millennium of his Passion (A.D. 1033), and, I argue, its significance may best be seen in the various responses to this apocalyptic disappointment: in great pilgrimages to the sites of Christ’s earthly life in Jerusalem; in popular and learned (heretical) rejections of the reality of Christ’s incarnation and the use of crucifixes; in the grammatical debate between Berengar of Tours and Lanfranc of Bec over the meaning of the liturgical formula Hoc est corpus meum; in the Gregorian reformers’ insistence on clerical celibacy as championed by Peter Damian; and, above all, in intensified efforts to become one with the historical Christ, not only through novel ascetic practices such as self-flagellation (likewise championed by Peter) but also through more traditional meditative practices, such as prayer, as crafted by Peter, John of Fécamp, and Anselm of Canterbury. The story culminates (chapters 5–8) in the twelfth century—following the capture of Jerusalem in the First Crusade—with the development of new modes of feeling, specifically new modes of empathy, as exemplified in the new effort to imagine Christ’s relationship with Mary through commentary on the Song of Songs (as developed by Honorius Augustodunensis and Rupert of Deutz) and in the corresponding meditative construction of an image of Mary as the compassionate mother who suffered in spirit all the physical pains of her Son (as explored, for example, by Philip of Harvengt and William of Newburgh in their commentaries on the Song). It was on the foundation of this latter image, I conclude, that the late-medieval edifice of devotion to the Man of Sorrows and the Mater Dolorosa was constructed. For all its passion and emotion, this edifice was an intensely intellectual artifact.

The argument proceeds simultaneously on a number of different levels. On one level, this is a study of the creative response of a number of individual writers (Paschasius, the Heliand poet, Berengar, Lanfranc, Peter, John, Anselm, Honorius, Rupert, Philip, and William) to the particular intellectual, social, and cultural changes that they confronted in their lives. I have taken as read the necessity to situate these changes within their larger historical contexts; I have been equally interested, however, in tracing the particular tensions evoked, for example, by the contest of world views occasioned by the Carolingian conversion of Saxony and by the rise of a money economy in post-1033 Europe. My concern has been to situate not only the new ideas—about sacrament, prayer, and empathy—but also their authors, so as to make clear the intellectual and psychological dynamics of devotional change in parallel with its theological and institutional settings. In this respect, this book is a contribution to the continuing effort to remake medieval intellectual history as a history of persons and communities rather than, as previously, a history of impersonal concepts—in this instance, to situate theology and biblical exegesis within the daily lives of those responsible for crafting them. The daily life of the monastery was the life of prayer; its principal artifact was, as Mary Carruthers has put it, thoughts about God.⁷ It is this process of thinking that I am interested in describing: how it was that the monks crafted the prayers and commentaries that they did, and why.

On another level, I move beyond the concern with particular individuals and communities to address much larger scale processes of making and change, the artifact in this instance being not individual prayers or treatises but, rather, a whole imaginative and emotional climate. How did it happen, the great art historian Emile Mâle once asked, that, in the fourteenth century, Christians wished to see their God suffer and die? Mâle called this question one of the most interesting presented by the history of Christianity, and subsequent scholars have generally concurred.⁸ The problem is that it is so very difficult to account for widespread changes in human sentiment in other than the most broadly descriptive (if not crudely reductive) terms. This is where the aggregate focus on individual authors has proved itself to be particularly cogent: many, although not all, of the works with whose authors I am concerned were themselves instrumental in effecting this change in sentiment. They were, in other words, not only witnesses to but also agents of the change, in that they in turn elicited response, whether through scholarly controversy (as with Paschasius’s treatise on the Eucharist) or through artistic example (as with Anselm of Canterbury’s prayers to the Virgin and Christ). To the extent that these individual fragments may be taken for the whole, I have attempted whenever possible to illustrate their links both geographically and temporally. The scale of the change being admittedly vast (European sentiment and culture over the course of several centuries), it has seemed better to do somewhat more than simply list the actors in the process, as items in evidence; rather, I have attempted to demonstrate their intimate connections in as much detail as possible. Additionally, on this level, I have also attempted to mediate between arguments that would cast the climatic change more or less internally, as a development from within the Christian tradition of hitherto latent potentialities or deficiencies, and those that would cast it externally, as a response to pressures brought to bear on the tradition from outside, whether cognitive, political, material, or social.

Ultimately, however, this book is a study of devotion and devotional change, its goal being not only to situate the devotion to Christ and Mary historically but also to explain its appeal to its practitioners. What did it mean—for Paschasius, for the Saxon converts, for Berengar, for Lanfranc—to believe that Christ’s body was present in truth in the bread and wine of the Eucharist? What did it mean—for Peter or John of Fécamp or Anselm—to pray to Christ as the crucified Judge, or—for Rupert or Philip or William—to imagine Mary as the compassionate Mother? These are questions that cannot be answered with generalities about experience or symbols or culture, but only with reference to particulars. It is for this reason that I have given the attention that I have to individual authors writing in specific circumstances: to illustrate from within the way in which devotion works, the problems that it solves, as well as the problems that it raises. It is from this perspective that I have asked, for example, why Peter Damian and Anselm of Canterbury wrote the prayers that they did: so as to recover something of the sense of the work that these prayers did in the lives of their authors. To do so, I have had occasion to appeal both to the symbolic tradition in which particular prayers, commentaries, sermons, treatises, letters, and liturgies were written and (when appropriate) to the hermeneutics of conversion, to the psychology of narrative and debt, to the hermeneutics of empathy, and so forth. I have written with the conviction that it is not only possible but necessary to read these texts on their own terms, if, that is, we are to recover something of the power that they had for their original authors and audiences.⁹

A final word on the approach I take in this book to the problem of devotional change. I have assumed throughout that the images of Christ and Mary with which I am concerned were things made in time. I am not, therefore, looking to discover some stable essence in these images, nor to judge whether a particular interpretation of Christ or Mary was more or less true to the historical original or to some theological ideal. Neither am I looking to judge whether these images were psychologically or socially beneficial or detrimental to their makers; this book is not, in other words, a theoretical critique. It is a history of intellectual and emotional change, and although I pay attention to the social function and effects of these changes (as, for example, in the appearance of heresy, or in the relationship of Mary to the status and role of other women), I privilege neither function nor critique. However much we may recognize the extent to which the body of Christ or the compassion of Mary was socially and culturally constructed, Christ and Mary were not simply symbols for medieval Christians, and it would have been anathema—not to say nonsensical—to suggest that they were no more than artifacts of the human imagination. Rather, they were imagined—and, therefore, experienced—as living forces, and it is as such that I have tried to describe them. The ethical implications of this construction may be contested; the creative force cannot.

Part One

CHRISTUS PATIENS

CHAPTER ONE

History, Conversion, and the Saxon Christ

The Chieftain’s Son remained at the feast, and there, for His followers, the holy King of Heaven, the Ruler, made both wine and bread holy. He broke it with His hands, gave it to His followers and thanked God, expressing His gratitude to the One who created everything—the world and its happiness—and He spoke many a word (uuord). Believe Me clearly, He said, "that this is My body and also My blood. I here give both of them to you to eat and drink. This is what I will give and pour out on earth. With My body I will free you to come to God’s kingdom, to eternal life in heaven’s light. Always remember to continue to do what I am doing at this supper, tell the story of it to many men. This body and blood is a thing which possesses power (thit is mahtig thing): with it you will give honor to your Chieftain. It is a holy image (helag biliδi): keep it in order to remember Me, so that the sons of men will do it after you and preserve it in this world, and thus everyone all over this middle world will know what I am doing out of love to give honor to the Lord."¹   —Anonymous (ninth century), Heliand

Corpus Christi, God made flesh in the bread and wine of the Eucharist, in the sacrament of the altar—this was the daily miracle that lay at the experiential, intellectual, and symbolic center of the late medieval devotion to Christ in his humanity and to his mother in her grief, the continuing and repeatable miracle of God’s physical, material, and, above all, historical presence in the very same flesh in which he had become incarnate from the womb of the Virgin.² This was the miracle assumed by Saint Francis of Assisi (d. 1226) in his insistence that his brothers should show all possible reverence and honor to the most holy Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, and that the priests among them should do their work at the altar worthily, for if the Blessed Virgin is so honored, as is becoming, because she carried Him in her most holy womb; if the Baptist trembled and did not dare to touch the holy head of God; if the tomb in which He lay for some time is held in veneration, how holy, just and fitting must be he who touches with his hands, receives in his heart and mouth, and offers to others to be received the One Who is not about to die but Who is to conquer and be glorified.³ This was the miracle confirmed (or asserted) throughout the later Middle Ages in (stories of) visions of babies rent asunder in the hands of the priest, or of hosts found dripping with blood, or of patens filled not with bread, but with pieces of raw flesh.⁴ This was the miracle that caused devout women like Dorothy of Montau (d. 1394) to rush from church to church in order to see God held aloft in the hands of the priest at the moment of consecration as many as a hundred times in one day, the miracle that inspired Juliana of Mont Cornillon (c. 1193–1258) to campaign for the institution of a new feast dedicated to the celebration of the Eucharist and to the host consecrated therein.⁵ And this was the miracle contested repeatedly by heretics as various as Berengar of Tours (d. 1088), the Cathars of Cologne, Toulouse, and Montaillou, and John Wyclif (d. 1384) and the Lollards of late-fourteenth- and early-fifteenth-century England.⁶ Indeed, just as it was belief in this miracle that, from 1215, canonically defined the community of the faithful, outside of which no one at all is saved, so it was in challenging this belief (among others) that men and women like the late-medieval Cathars and Lollards came to be defined as heretics—that is, as no longer members of the community of the saved. For, asserted the first canon of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215),

[in] this church, Jesus Christ is himself both priest and sacrifice, and his body and blood are really (veraciter) contained in the sacrament of the altar under the species of bread and wine, the bread being transubstantiated into the body and the wine into the blood by the power of God, so that to carry out the mystery of unity we ourselves receive from Him the body He himself receives from us.⁷

And yet, for all its importance in the definition of the late-medieval community of Christendom, for all its centrality in the devotional life of late-medieval women like Dorothy and Juliana and men like Francis (and, in its negative valence, like Berengar and John Wyclif), for all that it was, in Miri Rubin’s apt paraphrase of Clifford Geertz’s words, at the centre of the whole religious system of the later Middle Ages, even in the thirteenth century with the promulgation of the canons of Lateran IV, this confidence—that Christ himself was present veraciter, historically or substantially in the bread and wine of the sacrament—was in point of fact relatively new.⁸ It was not, after all, a confidence that the early Christian Fathers shared, nor indeed was the manner of Christ’s presence in the eucharistic elements a question to which they felt it necessary to give any special attention, other than to affirm its sacred reality as the body of the Lord.⁹ To be sure, Ambrose of Milan (d. 397) and Augustine of Hippo (d. 430) both addressed the question, albeit somewhat obliquely (the former in a collection of addresses preached during the octave of Easter to the catechumens newly baptized on Easter day, the latter in two letters to the layman Januarius, in a handbook for the instruction of catechumens, and in his commentary on the Gospel of John). Nevertheless, for Ambrose, the operative question was not so much the historical reality of the creative transformation effected in the Eucharist per se, but rather the reality of the communicative experience of the sacrament effected in its present human participants: having been reborn through baptism, the catechumens shared in the eucharistic feast, and if asked how the bread that they brought to the altar became, or signified, the body of Christ, they might reassure themselves that it is Christ’s own words that make the sacrament, the words by which all things were made: the heavens, the earth, the sea and all living creatures.… If the words of Christ have such power that things which did not exist should come into being, have they not the power that things which did exist shall continue in being and be changed into something else?¹⁰ In contrast, for Augustine, the sacrament was arguably more symbol than ritual (although neither exclusively), its effect not only to bind the communicants together in charity but also to provoke an act of remembering: for the catechumen properly educated in biblical history, the physical elements of the sacrament, like the written words of Scripture, could be read as signs or figures inviting the reader to interpretation and thereby to an understanding of the sacred rite as a commemoration of past deeds, themselves recognizable through interpretation as acts of God’s love. In this way the communicant would recognize himself or herself as redeemed in the story of the God-man.¹¹ Neither of these Fathers was particularly concerned, however, to establish an exact causal identity between the consecrated bread and wine and the historical body and blood.

In fact, it was only in the ninth century—following the forcible conversion of the Saxons and Avars by the Franks and the contemporary efforts to reform, Romanize, and standardize the Gallican liturgy in accordance with the educational program set out by Charlemagne in his Admonitio generalis of 789—that the nature of the Eucharist—specifically, of the change effected through the consecration of the bread and wine, and thus of the relationship between the sacramental and the historical body and blood of the Savior—would itself become a matter for concentrated theological exposition, most famously at the great royal abbey of Corbie.¹² There were a number of reasons for this new emphasis. On the one hand, the Carolingian project of standardization provoked a new consciousness not only of the liturgy as ritual but also of the discrepancies within the interpretive tradition, particularly among the descriptions provided by the Fathers such as Ambrose and Augustine—discrepancies that it now became incumbent upon the theologians to resolve.¹³ On the other hand, the project of education, including the education of the laity, enjoined upon the clergy an ideal not only of Christian unity but also of comprehension: it was not enough, the Frankish bishops insisted, for the people simply to participate in the rituals of the universal Church; they must also understand them.¹⁴ This process of instruction, a daunting task (as Augustine himself had realized) even at the best of times, was even further complicated in the ninth century by the influx of (at times, involuntary) new converts to the Church from paganism, converts for whom not only the ideal of Christian unity but, indeed, the very fundamentals of the Christian faith—that the world itself was a creature of God, that that same God had become incarnate in human history, that history was a working out of God’s love for humanity, that (as Augustine had understood it) to be saved was to recognize oneself as a participant in this history—were quite simply nonsense, descriptions of a reality that was, in their view, no-reality. From this perspective, differences, for example, between the Gallican or Ambrosian language of sacramental change and the Roman or Augustinian language of symbolic presence (in Joseph Geiselmann’s formulation of the question) were, if not, in fact, irrelevant, then at the very least much less pressing than they would appear to those working from within the Christian tradition itself.

Not coincidentally, this problem of instructing the newly baptized pagans in the fundamentals of Christian ritual and history was of particular concern to the monks at Corbie, where, under Charlemagne’s cousin Adalhard (abbot 780–815), a number of Saxon warriors had been resettled as a part of the emperor’s pacification program.¹⁵ In 822 one of these monks, Paschasius Radbertus (c. 790–865), assisted Adalhard in confirming the foundation of a daughterhouse, Corvey (Corbeia Nova), in central Saxony near Paderborn, and in 833 Warin, a former student of Paschasius, was appointed abbot there.¹⁶ Significantly, prior to his appointment as abbot, Warin had served as the magister monasticae disciplinae at Corvey, and he was also part Saxon himself. It is not surprising, therefore, that he was especially sensitive to the difficulties involved in explaining the new rituals to his Saxon novices, and in 831 he had asked his old teacher for assistance.¹⁷ In response, Paschasius wrote the work that was to set the terms for all subsequent discussion of the Eucharist in the Middle Ages—insofar, that is, as it asserted (or denied) the real presence of the historical, terrestrial, risen, and now glorified body of Christ in the consecrated elements of the bread and wine. And indeed, it is for this reason, if for no other, that it is worth our attention here, at the outset of a history of the devotion to the humanity of Christ and his mother’s compassion: it was through Paschasius and the contemporary concern to convert the Saxons to the history upon which the miracle of the liturgy depended that the intellectual and experiential stakes in this devotion would first become clear.

Although couched in the abstract patristic vocabulary of figure and sacrament, Paschasius’s argument in his De corpore et sanguine Domini is unambiguously physical, or material: after the consecration, the bread and wine are truly (in veritate) the historical body and blood of Christ. A decade or so later (in 843 or 844), when Paschasius, newly abbot of Corbie, presented a revised copy of his work to the emperor Charles the Bald (840–877) as a Christmas present, this argument seems to have created something of a stir at court, and Charles in turn sent a request to Corbie for clarification.¹⁸ He asked two questions: whether the Eucharist presented the body and blood in mysterio… an in veritate, and whether that body was the body born of Mary, that suffered, died and was buried, and that rising again ascended into heaven and sits on the right hand of the Father.¹⁹ The answer that Charles requested came not from Paschasius but from Ratramnus (d. c. 875), one of the younger monks at Corbie, who in his response to the emperor affected a greater degree of theological subtlety than that which his abbot had used in writing to the Saxon novices ten years earlier. Ratramnus affirmed that the bread and wine received in the mouths of the faithful were truly the body and blood, but invisibly, not visibly: As visible created objects they feed the body, but in virtue of their more powerful status they feed and sanctify the minds of the faithful.²⁰ Paschasius, stung by the intellectual challenge presented by this upstart theoretician, forcefully reaffirmed his position a few years later in an open letter to another former student of his, Fredugard, who had read both books and was, as Gary Macy says, understandably quite confused.²¹ Paschasius assured him: "No one who is sane believes that Jesus had any other flesh and blood than that which was born of the Virgin Mary and suffered on the Cross. And it is that very same flesh (ipsa namque eademque caro), in whatever manner (quocumque modo), that should be understood, I believe, when he says: ‘This is my body that is given for many,’ and ‘This is my blood.’"²²

The traditional interpretation of this theological exchange is one of controversy, two monks battling openly for the favor of the king, one asserting the real presence, and the other insisting on a proto-Protestant denial of substantial change, but for some time now such a reading of the discussion has generally been considered oversimplistic (not to mention anachronistic).²³ Both Paschasius and Ratramnus argued that the bread and wine were truly the body and blood, but they differed on the manner in which the sacramental elements should be understood as a figure (figura) and on the nature of the truth (veritas) to which they provided access. Ratramnus argued that it was necessary to distinguish between the truth accessible to the bodily senses and the truth accessible to the understanding: in that the bread and wine remained sensibly bread and wine, they could not be the historical body and blood of Christ in veritate, otherwise the bread and wine would be perceived by the senses as bones, nerves, and muscles; rather, the bread and wine provided access to the true body of Christ in figura, the sensed reality acting as a veil for the spiritual reality that it signified.²⁴ In contrast, Paschasius argued for an identity between the sensible figure and the thing signified, since the thing of which it is a figure is true (ut sit res uera cuius figura est).²⁵ After the consecration, the body and blood still appeared to the senses in the figure of bread and wine, but in that figure there is nothing at all but the flesh and blood of Christ.²⁶

To explain how this might be, Paschasius appealed on the one hand to God’s creative power (God’s spoken word), and on the other to biblical history (God’s written word). According to Paschasius, the bread and wine are a sacrament of faith, both a truth (veritas) and a figure (figura): a truth, because the body and blood of Christ are made from the substance of bread and wine by the spiritual power of the word; and a figure, because the lamb is sacrificed daily on the altar by the priest in memory of the sacred passion.²⁷ As a figure, the Eucharist was, therefore, akin to the events and persons in the Old Testament, themselves read by biblical exegetes for centuries as shadows or foreshadowings of events and persons in the New. Where Paschasius differed from his contemporaries, however, was in his emphasis on the literal, historical reality of these Old Testament figures.²⁸ The Paschal lamb, the manna from heaven, the water from the rock, the morning and evening sacrifices of the Law were figures of the Passion of Christ, but they were also eaten and drunk by the Jews: Not every figure is a shadow or a falsehood.²⁹ If these Old Testament figures were real and yet spiritually types of the eucharistic sacrament, then how could the sacrament itself be otherwise than the true flesh and blood of the Savior consumed in mysterio?³⁰ The real problem, as Paschasius saw it, was, rather, how to distinguish between the scriptural figures and the elemental figures, between the Paschal lamb and the bread and wine. His answer: that the Eucharist became, in veritate, the body and blood through the spiritual power of the word, that same word of the Creator, by which all things visible and invisible were created.³¹

Brian Stock has argued that the novelty in Paschasius’s approach to the problem of sacramental change was to suggest that the concrete representation of the Eucharist and its associated rituals could be interpreted at all: Paschasius not only revived and consolidated a rather oversimplified view of patristic teachings on the Eucharist.… [He] introduced them into an intellectual milieu in which any sort of hermeneutics was regarded as superfluous.³² For Stock, this novel intellectual milieu is the oral tradition of the illiterate, with its essential physicality and its emphasis on the spoken, the physically symbolic, and the performative, as against the literate tradition of the written, the allegorical, and the search for meaning beneath the formalistic surface.³³ Certainly, Paschasius’s literate contemporaries were sometimes shocked (not to say, horrified) by the extreme physicality of his position. (The wandering Saxon pseudo-monk, and sometime student of Ratramnus, Gottschalk of Orbais [c. 803–869], best known for his controversial teaching on predestination, explicitly accused Paschasius of advocating a cannibalistic realism in which Christ suffered torture at the celebration of each and every Mass.³⁴) But there is a problem here. If, as Stock and others have argued, Paschasius’s attention was drawn to the Eucharist as ritual by contemporary changes in ritual (particularly the substitution of the Roman Mass for the old Gallican rite and the subsequent modification of the Roman rite to better accord with Frankish expectations),³⁵ it is, nevertheless, still unclear from this perspective why Paschasius should attempt to reconcile the spoken word of the priest with the reality of the historical body and blood in the way that he did. Others more actively involved in the actual reform of the liturgy, as, for example, Amalarius of Metz (c. 775-c. 850), were arguably better placed to comment on this discontinuity between performance and history, but Amalarius himself proposed not a simple identity between the eucharistic and historical body but, rather, a triform body effected by the fraction of the host, namely, first, the holy and immaculate [body] assumed from the Virgin Mary; second, that which walks on the earth; third, that which lies in the sepulchre: the fraction dipped in the chalice represented Christ’s historical body risen from the dead, that eaten by the priest or by the people represented his body walking on the earth, and that left on the altar represented the body in the sepulcher.³⁶ Clearly, performance in itself need not evoke an immediate emphasis on physicality, nor in itself preclude (in Stock’s words) the literate search for meaning beneath the formalistic surface.³⁷

How, then, we must ask, did Paschasius come to be so insistent on the historical, physical reality of the sacramental elements as effected by the spoken word?

One way to answer this question would be to argue that Paschasius came to his understanding of the Eucharist from within the Christian tradition, through a close study of the patristic literature as a part of his training as a monk; and as is well-known, in the course of the De corpore he makes extensive use of Ambrose’s ritual explication of the sacrament.³⁸ Paschasius’s starting point, a discussion of God’s absolute creative power, is strongly reminiscent of Ambrose’s address to the Milanese catechumens: it is by the will of God that everything created has its nature; therefore, nothing that exists can, properly speaking, be against nature because nothing is impossible for God, when everything that exists is the will of God, and whatever God wills, has its singular existence—as all the miracles of both the Old and New Testaments attest.³⁹ Nevertheless, as noted above, for Ambrose, the focus of the transformative power of Christ’s words as spoken by the priest was not so much the sacramental elements as the human participants in the sacrament: if at the moment of consecration, the priest used not his own words, but Christ’s, that same word by which all things were made, the catechumens should understand that it was not only the bread and wine that would be made new, but also themselves as they received the sacrament.⁴⁰ For Paschasius, the focus was the change in the bread and wine at the moment of the priest’s speaking, a change perceptible to the communicants not so much as a change in themselves at the moment of reception, but rather as a change in the elements’ potential effect on them: even those who received the elements in an unworthy manner would receive not mere bread and wine but the true body and blood, a fact to which those who had had miraculous visions of a child broken in the hands of the priest could attest.⁴¹ Paschasius’s contemporaries were quick to point out the discrepancies between his understanding of Ambrose and theirs (if not the discrepancies between Augustine and Ambrose), and for Ratramnus, these discrepancies were decisive: But truly the body that is called the mystery of God is not corporeal but spiritual, and because it is spiritual, it is neither visible, nor palpable. Hence blessed Ambrose continued [here], saying, ‘The body of Christ is the body of the divine spirit.’⁴² Like liturgical performance, patristic exegesis could and did support quite different theologies.⁴³

The difficulty is that the history of theological discussion has traditionally been written as a history of authors in which the differences between, for example, Paschasius’s and Ratramnus’s interpretations of the Eucharist are ascribed to differences in their authors’ idiosyncratic intellectual positions. But it is also possible to consider these differences as a consequence of differences in the audiences for whom the theological treatises were written, and indeed, as we shall see, it is only from this perspective that Paschasius’s emphasis on the spoken word and on the physical, historical reality of the eucharistic body comes clearly into focus.⁴⁴ The monks for whom Paschasius was writing were not Romans or Franks but Saxons and the children of Saxons, and it is my contention, therefore, that the De corpore et sanguine Domini, and thus the Paschasian doctrine of the real presence (along with all its implications for the subsequent development of the devotion to Christ in his humanity) can best be understood as artifacts of their conversion to Christianity.

To understand why, it will be necessary to consider not only the Frankish program for the conversion of the Saxons but also the contemporary reform of the Frankish liturgy and the corollary effort to instruct the laity (the people of God) in its significance. Above all, however, it will be necessary to consider in some depth the process of conversion itself. As we shall see, for Augustine and his readers among the Frankish clergy like Paschasius, who were concerned with the instruction of the people, conversion was to be understood as a process not only of instruction but of translation. In this context, Paschasius’s representation of the body and blood as historically present was an attempt to translate the written history of the Incarnation into a spoken history of the Word-made-flesh. The gap that made this translation necessary had as much to do with differences between Saxon and Frankish perceptions of history as it did with any arguable differences between oral and literate tradition. The Frankish clergy were conscious of this gap, and they were also convinced that they knew how best to overcome it: as they saw it, real translation could be effected only in a moment of sympathy, the potential convert or catechumen becoming capable of understanding and learning from the missionary only from the moment that the missionary adapted his speech to the understanding of the catechumen. Whether or not it was usual (or possible) to realize this moment in practice, the effort to do so was paradigmatic for Paschasius’s attempt to make sense of the Eucharist for Warin’s Saxon novices, and it was fundamental to his conception of the efficacy of the sacrament as a moment of translation at which God became flesh in order to adapt his divinity to the understanding and experience of human beings, making of them through the Eucharist one flesh with his own (in Christo naturaliter unum corpus).⁴⁵

Converting the Pagans

Saxons, or rather pagans, as they were known, are familiar if sometimes shadowy characters in the history of the Frankish church, although it is well known that their conversion to Christianity was as important for the growth of the Carolingian empire as it was for Charlemagne’s program of ecclesiastical reform.⁴⁶ As the capitulary de partibus Saxoniae issued by Charlemagne circa 785 at Paderborn made clear, like infidelity to the king, offenses against Christian practice were to be punished by death. Passive acceptance was insufficient: the people, whether noble, free, or lidi (neither serfs nor free), were required to support the churches and clergy with tithes, farmsteads, and slaves and to pay fines to the royal fisc if they did not baptize their children within the year of their birth.⁴⁷ Moreover, by the terms of the Admonitio generalis issued during the peace that followed the initial subjugation of Saxony, the Saxons were likewise required, along with the Franks, to accept instruction from the clergy, who, in their turn, were exhorted to teach all the people the essential articles of the faith and the basic moral principles according to which they were to conduct themselves as Christians.⁴⁸ This instruction was to include not only warnings against pagan practices like praying at trees, stones, or springs, and prohibitions of avarice, bestiality, homicide, homosexuality, perjury, sorcery, augury, and so forth, but also explanations of the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, the meaning of the Incarnation, and, as reiterated repeatedly in later capitularies and episcopal statutes, the meaning of the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist.⁴⁹ The degree to which a knowledge of Saxon rituals influenced this process of elucidation is debatable, but the influence of Saxon religious expectations on the process should not be underestimated. In the wake of the conquest, Saxony was no longer a world apart: Frankish counts held lands in Saxony settled by transplanted Franks, and thousands of Saxons, with their wives and children, had been forcibly resettled in Gaul and Germany.⁵⁰ When in 812 Charlemagne asked his archbishops to describe for him how they and their suffragans teach and instruct the priests of God and the people commissioned to [them] on the sacrament of baptism, he received dozens of replies: adult baptism was a pressing concern for all.⁵¹

Having persuaded the Saxon pagans to accept baptism (performed ideally