# The Waning of the Middle Ages/Chapter 12

CHAPTER XII
RELIGIOUS THOUGHT CRYSTALLIZING INTO IMAGES
Towards the end of the Middle Ages two factors dominate religious life: the extreme saturation of the religious atmosphere, and a marked tendency of thought to embody itself in images.
Individual and social life, in all their manifestations, are imbued with the conceptions of faith. There is not an object nor an action, however trivial, that is not constantly correlated with Christ or salvation. All thinking tends to religious interpretation of individual things; there is an enormous unfolding of religion in daily life. This spiritual wakefulness, however, results in a dangerous state of tension, for the presupposed transcendental feelings are sometimes dormant, and whenever this is the case, all that is meant to stimulate spiritual consciousness is reduced to appalling commonplace profanity, to a startling worldliness in other-worldly guise. Only saints are capable of an attitude of mind in which the transcendental faculties are never in abeyance.
The spirit of the Middle Ages, still plastic and naive, longs to give concrete shape to every conception. Every thought seeks expression in an image, but in this image it solidifies and becomes rigid. By this tendency to embodiment in visible forms all holy concepts are constantly exposed to the danger of hardening into mere externalism. For in assuming a definite figurative shape thought loses its ethereal and vague qualities, and pious feeling is apt to resolve itself in the image.
Even in the case of a sublime mystic, like Henry Suso, the craving for hallowing every action of daily life verges in our eyes on the ridiculous. He is sublime when, following the usages of profane love, he celebrates New Year’s Day and May Day by offering a wreath and a song to his betrothed, ​Eternal Wisdom, or when, out of reverence for the Holy Virgin, he renders homage to all womankind and walks in the mud to let a beggar woman pass. But what are we to think of what follows? At table Suso eats three-quarters of an apple in the name of the Trinity and the remaining quarter in commemoration of “the love with which the heavenly Mother gave her tender child Jesus an apple to eat”; and for this reason he eats the last quarter with the paring, as little boys do not peel their apples. After Christmas he does not eat it, for then the infant Jesus was too young to eat apples. He drinks in five draughts because of the five wounds of the Lord, but as blood and water flowed from the side of Christ, he takes his last draught twice. This is, indeed, pushing the sanctification of life to extremes.
In so far as it concerns individual piety, this tendency to apply religious conceptions to all things and at all times is a deep source of saintly life. As a cultural phenomenon this same tendency harbours grave dangers. Religion penetrating all relations in life means a constant blending of the spheres of holy and of profane thought. Holy things will become too common to be deeply felt. The endless growth of observances, images, religious interpretations, signifies an augmentation in quantity at which serious divines grew alarmed, as they feared the quality would deteriorate proportionately. The warning which we find recurring in all reformist writings of the time of the schism and of the councils is—the Church is being overloaded.
Pierre d’Ailly, in condemning the novelties which were incessantly introduced into the liturgy and the sphere of belief, is less concerned about the piety of their character than about the steady increase itself. The signs of the ever-ready divine grace multiplied endlessly; a host of special benedictions sprang up side by side with the sacraments; in addition to relics we find amulets; the bizarre gallery of saints became ever more numerous and variegated. However emphatically divines insisted upon the difference between sacraments and sacramentalia, the people would still confound them. Gerson tells how he met a man at Auxerre, who maintained that All Fools’ Day was as sacred as the day of the Virgin’s Conception. Nicolas de Clemanges wrote a treatise, De novis festivitatibus non ​instituendis, in which he denounced the apocryphal nature of some among these new institutions. Pierre d’Ailly, in De Reformatione, deplores the ever-increasing number of churches, of festivals, of saints, of holy-days; he protests against the multitude of images and paintings, the prolixity of the Service, against the introduction of new hymns and prayers, against the augmentation of vigils and fasts. In short, what alarms him is the evil of superfluity.
There are too many religious orders, says d’Ailly, and this leads to a diversity of usages, to exclusiveness and rivalry, to pride and vanity. In particular he desired to impose restrictions on the mendicant orders, whose social utility he question : they live to the detriment of the inmates of leper houses and hospitals, and other really poor and wretched people, who are truly entitled to beg (ac aliis vere pauperibus et miserabilibus indigentibus quibus convenit jus et verus titulus mendicandi). Let the sellers of indulgences be banished from the Church, which they soil with their lies and make ridiculous. Convents are built on all sides, but sufficient funds are lacking. Where is this to lead?
Pierre d’Ailly does not question the holy and pious character of all these practices in themselves, he only deplores their endless multiplication; he sees the Church weighed down under the load of particulars.
Religious customs tended to multiply in an almost mechanical way. A special office was instituted for every detail of the worship of the Virgin Mary. There were particular masses, afterwards abolished by the Church, in honour of the piety of Mary, of her seven sorrows, of all her festivals taken collectively, of her sisters—the two other Marys—of the archangel Gabriel, of all the saints of our Lord’s genealogy. A curious example of this spontaneous accretion of religious usage is found in the weekly observance of Innocents’ Day. The 28th of December, the day of the massacre at Bethlehem, was taken to be ill-omened. This belief was the origin of a custom, widely spread during the fifteenth century, of considering as a black-letter day, all the year through, the day of the week on which the preceding Innocents’ Day fell. Consequently, there was one day in every week on which people abstained from setting out upon a journey and beginning a ​new task, and this day was called Innocents’ Day, like the festival itself. Louis XI observed this usage scrupulously. The coronation of Edward IV of England was repeated, as it had taken place on a Sunday, because the 28th of December of the previous year had been a Sunday too. René de Lorraine had to give up his plan of fighting a battle on the 17th of October, 1476, as his lansquenets refused to encounter the enemy “on Innocents’ Day.”
This belief, of which we find some traces appearing in England as late as the eighteenth century, called forth a treatise from Gerson against superstition in general. His penetrating mind had realized some of the danger with which these excrescences of the creed menaced the purity of religious thought. He was aware of their psychological basis; according to him, these beliefs proceed ex sola hominum phantasiatione et melancholica imaginatione; it is a disorder of the imagination caused by some lesion of the brain, which in its turn is due to diabolic illusions.
The Church was constantly on her guard lest dogmatic truth should be confounded with this mass of facile beliefs, and lest the exuberance of popular fancy should degrade God. But was she able to stand against this strong need of giving a concrete form to all the emotions accompanying religious thought? It was an irresistible tendency to reduce the infinite to the finite, to disintegrate all mystery. The highest mysteries of the creed became covered with a crust of superficial piety. Even the profound faith in the eucharist expands into childish beliefs—for instance, that one cannot go blind or have a stroke of apoplexy on a day on which one has heard mass, or that one does not grow older during the time spent in attending mass. While herself offering so much food to the popular imagination, the Church could not claim to keep that imagination within the limits of a healthy and vigorous piety.
In this respect the case of Gerson is characteristic. He composed a treatise, Contra vanam curiositatem, by which he means the spirit of research which desires to scrutinize the secrets of nature. But whilst protesting against it, he himself becomes guilty of a curiosity which to us seems out of place and deplorable. Gerson was the great promoter of the adoration of Saint Joseph. His veneration for this saint makes ​him desirous of learning all that concerns him. He routs out all particulars of the married life of Joseph: his continence, his age, the way in which he learned of the Virgin’s pregnancy. He is indignant at the caricature of a drudging and ridiculous Joseph, which the arts were inclined to make of him. In another passage Gerson indulges in a speculation on the bodily constitution of Saint John the Baptist : Semen igitur materiale ex qua corpus compaginandum erat, nec durum nimis nec rursus fluidum abundantius fuit.
Whether the Virgin had taken an active part in the supernatural conception, or, again, whether the body of Christ would have decomposed, if it had not been for the resurrection, were what the popular preacher Olivier Maillard called “beautiful theological questions” to discuss before his auditors. The mixture of theological and embryological speculation to which the controversy about the immaculate conception of the Virgin gave rise shocked the minds of that period so little that grave divines did not scruple to treat the subject from the pulpit.
This familiarity with sacred things is, on the one hand, a sign of deep and ingenuous faith; on the other, it entails irreverence whenever mental contact with the infinite fails. Curiosity, ingenuous though it be, leads to profanation. In the fifteenth century people used to keep statuettes of the Virgin, of which the body opened and showed the Trinity within. The inventory of the treasure of the dukes of Burgundy makes mention of one made of gold inlaid with gems. Gerson saw one in the Carmelite monastery at Paris; he blames the brethren for it, not, however, because such a coarse picture of the miracle shocked him as irreverent, but because of the heresy of representing the Trinity as the fruit of Mary.
All life was saturated with religion to such an extent that the people were in constant danger of losing sight of the distinction between things spiritual and things temporal. If, on the one hand, all details of ordinary life may be raised to a sacred level, on the other hand, all that is holy sinks to the commonplace, by the fact of being blended with everyday life. In the Middle Ages the demarcation of the sphere of religious thought and that of worldly concerns was nearly obliterated. It occasionally happened that indulgences figured among the prizes of ​a lottery. When a prince was making a solemn entry, the altars at the corners of the streets, loaded with the precious reliquaries of the town and served by prelates, might be seen alternating with dumb shows of pagan goddesses or comic allegories.
Nothing is more characteristic in this respect than the fact of there being hardly any difference between the musical character of profane and sacred melodies. Till late in the sixteenth century profane melodies might be used indiscriminately for sacred use, and sacred for profane. It is notorious that Guillaume Dufay and others composed masses to the theme of love-songs, such as “Tant je me déduis,” “Se la face ay pale,” “L’omme armé.”
There was a constant interchange of religious and profane terms. No one felt offended by hearing the Day of Judgment compared to a settling of accounts, as in the verses formerly written over the door of the audit office at Lille.
“Lors ouvrira, au son de buysine Sa générale et grant chambre des comptes.”
A tournament, on the other hand, is called “des armes grantdisime pardon” (the great indulgence conferred by arms) as if it were a pilgrimage. By a chance coincidence the words mysterium and ministerium were blended in French into the form “mistère,” and this homonymy must have helped to efface the true sense of the word “mystery” in everyday parlance, because even the most commonplace things might be called “mistère.”
While religious symbolism represented the realities of nature and history as symbols or emblems of salvation, on the other hand religious metaphors were borrowed to express profane sentiments. People in the Middle Ages, standing in awe of royalty, do not shrink from using the language of adoration in praising princes. In the lawsuit about the murder of Louis of Orleans, the counsel for the defence makes the shade of the duke say to his son: “Look at my wounds and observe that ​five of them are particularly cruel and mortal.” The bishop of Chalons, Jean Germain, in his Liber de virtutibus Philippi ducis Burgundiae, in his turn does not scruple to compare the victim of Montereau to the Lamb. The Emperor Frederick IIΙ, when sending his son Maximilian to the Low Countries to marry Mary of Burgundy, is compared by Molinet to God the Father. The same author makes the people of Brussels say, when they wept with tenderness on seeing the emperor entering their town with Maximilian and Philip le Beau: “Behold the image of the Trinity, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.” He offers a wreath of flowers to Mary of Burgundy, a worthy image of Our Lady, “secluse la virginité.” “Non point que je veuille déifier les princes!” Molinet adds.
Although we may consider such formulæ of adulation empty phrases, they show none the less the depreciation of sacred imagery resulting from its hackneyed use. We can hardly blame a court poet, when Gerson himself ascribes to the royal auditors of his sermons guardian angels of a higher rank in the celestial hierarchy than those of other men.
THE MADONNA OF MELUN. BY JEHAN FOUCQUET.
The irreverence of daily religious practice was almost unbounded. Choristers, when chanting mass, did not scruple to sing the words of the profane songs that had served as a theme for the composition: baisez-moi, rouges nez.
A startling piece of impudence is recorded of the father of the Frisian humanist Rodolph, Agricola, who received the news that his concubine had given birth to a son on the very day when he was elected abbot. “To-day I have twits become a father. God’s blessing on it!” said he.
At the end of the fourteenth century people took the increasing irreverence to be an evil of recent date, which, indeed, is a common phenomenon at all times. Deschamps deplores it in the following lines:
“On souloit estre ou temps passé En l’église benignement, A genoux en humilité Delez l’autel moult closement, Tout nu le chief piteusement, Maiz au jour d’uy, si come beste, On vient à l’autel bien souvent Chaperon et chapel en teste.”
On festal days, says Nicolas de Clemanges, few people go to mass. They do not stay till the end, and are content with touching the holy water, bowing before Our Lady, or kissing the image of some saint. If they wait for the elevation of the Host, they pride themselves upon it, as if they had conferred a ​benefit on Christ. At matins and vespers the priest and his assistant are the only persons present. The squire of the village makes the priest wait to begin mass till he and his wife have risen and dressed. The most sacred festivals, even Christmas night, says Gerson, are passed in debauchery, playing at cards, swearing and blaspheming. When the people are admonished, they plead the example of the nobility and the clergy, who behave in like manner with impunity. Vigils likewise, says Clemanges, are kept with lascivious songs and dances, even in church; priests set the example by dicing as they watch. It may be said that moralists paint things in too dark colours; but in the accounts of Strassburg we find a yearly gift of 1,100 litres of wine granted by the council to those who “watched in prayer” in church during the night of Saint Adolphus.
Denis the Carthusian wrote a treatise, De modo agendi processiones, at the request of an alderman, who asked him how one might remedy the dissoluteness and debauchery to which the annual procession, in which a greatly venerated relic was borne, gave rise. “How are we to put a stop to this?” asks the alderman. “You may be sure that the town council will not easily be persuaded to abolish it, for the procession brings large profits to the town, because of all the people who have to be fed and lodged. Besides, custom will have it so.” “Alas, yes,” sighs Denis; “he knows too well how processions were disgraced by ribaldry, mockery and drinking.” A most vivid picture of this evil is found in Chastellain’s description of the degradation into which the procession of the citizens of Ghent, with the shrine of Saint Liévin, to Houthem, had fallen. Formerly, he says, the notabilities were in the habit of carrying the holy body “with great and deep solemnity and reverence”; at present there is only “a mob of roughs, and boys of bad character”; they carry it singing and yelling, “with a hundred thousand gibes, and all are drunk.” They are armed, “and commit many offences where they pass, as if they were let loose and unchained; that day everything appears to be given up to them under the pretext of the body they carry.”
We have already mentioned how much disturbance was caused during church services by people vying with each other in politeness. The usage of making a trysting-place of the ​church by young men and young women was so universal that only moralists were scandalized by it. The virtuous Christine de Pisan makes a lover say in all simplicity:
“Se souvent vais ou moustier, C’est tout pour veoir la belle Fresche comme rose nouvelle.”
The Church suffered more serious profanation than the little love services of a young man who offered his fair one the “pax,” or knelt by her side. According to the preacher Menot, prostitutes had the effrontery to come there in search of customers. Gerson tells that even in the churches and on festival days obscene pictures were sold tanquam idola Belphegor, which corrupted the young, while sermons were ineffective to remedy this evil.
As to pilgrimages, moralists and satirists are of one mind; people often go “pour folle plaisance.” The Chevalier de la Tour Landry naïvely classes them with profane pleasures, and he entitles one of his chapters, “Of those who are fond of going to jousts and on pilgrimages.”
On festal days, exclaims Nicolas de Clemanges, people go to visit distant churches, not so much to redeem a pledge of pilgrimage as to give themselves up to pleasure. Pilgrimages are the occasions of all kinds of debauchery; procuresses are always found there, people come for amorous purposes. It is a common incident in the Quinze Joyes de Mariage; the young wife, who wants a change, makes her husband believe that the baby is ill, because she has not yet accomplished her vow of pilgrimage, made during her confinement. The marriage of Charles VI with Isabella of Bavaria was preceded by a pilgrimage. It is far from surprising that the serious followers of the devotio moderna called the utility of pilgrimages in question. Those who often go on pilgrimages, says Thomas à Kempis, rarely become saints. One of his friends, Frederick of Heilo, wrote a special treatise, Conira peregrinantes.
The excesses and abuses resulting from an extreme familiarity with things holy, as well as the insolent mingling of pleasure with religion, are generally characteristic of periods ​of unshaken faith and of a deeply religious culture. The same people who in their daily life mechanically follow the routine of a rather degraded sort of worship will be capable of rising suddenly, at the ardent word of a preaching monk, to unparalleled heights of religious emotion. Even the stupid sin of blasphemy has its roots in a profound faith. It is a sort of perverted act of faith, affirming the omnipresence of God and His intervention in the minutest concerns. Only the idea of really daring Heaven gives blasphemy its sinful charm. As soon as an oath loses its character of an invocation of God, the habit of swearing changes its nature and becomes mere coarseness. At the end of the Middle Ages blasphemy is still a sort of daring diversion which belongs to the nobility. “What!” says the nobleman to the peasant in a treatise by Gerson, “you give your soul to the devil, you deny God without being noble?” Deschamps, on his part, notices that the habit of swearing tends to descend to people of low estate.
“Si chétif n’y a qui ne die: Je renie Dieu et sa mère.”
People make a pastime of coining new and ingenious oaths, says Gerson: he who excels in this impious art is honoured as a master. Deschamps tells us that all France swore first after the Gascon and the English fashion, next after the Breton, and finally after the Burgundian. He composed two ballads in succession made up of all the oaths then in vogue strung together, and ended with a pious phrase. The Burgundian oath was the worst of all. It was, Je rente Dieu (I deny God), which was softened down to Je renie de bottes (boots). The Burgundians had the reputation of being abominable swearers; for the rest, says Gerson, the whole of France, for all her Christianity, suffers more than any other country from the effects of this horrible sin, which causes pestilence, war and famine. Even monks were guilty of mild swearing. Gerson and d’Ailly expressly call upon the authorities to combat the evil by renewing the strict regulations everywhere, but imposing light penalties which may be really exacted. And a royal decree of 1397, in fact, re-established the old ones of 1269 ​and 1347, but unfortunately also renewed the old penalties of lip-slitting and cutting out of tongues, which bore witness, it is true, to a holy horror of blasphemy, but which it was not possible to enforce. In the margin of the register containing the ordinance, someone has noted: “At present, 1411, all these oaths are in general use throughout the kingdom without being punished.”
Gerson, with his long experience as a confessor, knew the psychological nature of the sin of blasphemy very well. On the one hand, he says, there are the habitual swearers, who, though culpable, are not perjurers, as it is not their intention to take an oath. On the other, we find young men of a pure and simple nature who are irresistibly tempted to blaspheme and to deny God. Their case reminds us of John Bunyan’s, whose disease took the form of “a propensity to utter blasphemy, and especially to renounce his share in the benefits of the redemption.” Gerson counsels these young men to give themselves up less to the contemplation of God and the saints, as they lack the mental strength required.
It is impossible to draw the line of demarcation between an ingenuous familiarity and conscious infidelity. As early as the fifteenth century people liked to show themselves esprits forts and to deride piety in others. The word “papelard,” meaning a hypocrite, was in frequent use with lay writers of the time. “De jeune angelot vieux diable” (a young saint makes an old devil), said the proverb, or, in solemn Latin metre, Angelicus juvenis senibus sathanizat in annis. “It is by such sayings,” Gerson exclaims, “that youth is perverted. A brazen face, scurrilous language and curses, immodest looks and gestures, are praised in children. Well, what is to be expected in old age of a sathanizing youth?”
​We not unfrequently find individual expressions of avowed unbelief. “Beaux seigneurs,” says Captain Bétisac to his comrades when about to die, “I have attended to my spiritual concerns and, in my conscience, I believe I have greatly angered God, having for a long time already erred against the faith, and I cannot believe a word about the Trinity, nor that the Son of God has humbled Himself to such an extent as to come down from Heaven into the carnal body of a woman; and I believe and say that when we die there is no such thing as a soul. … I have held this opinion ever since I became self-conscious, and I shall hold it till the end.” The provost of Paris, Hugues Aubriot, is a violent hater of the clergy; he does not believe in the sacrament of the altar, he makes a mock of it; he does not keep Easter, he does not go to confession. Jacques du Clercq relates that several noblemen, in full possession of their faculties, refused extreme unction. Perhaps we should regard these isolated cases of unbelief less as wilful heresy than as a spontaneous reaction against the incessant and pressing call of the faith, arising from a culture overcharged with religious images and concepts. In any case, they should not be confounded either with the literary and superficial paganism of the Renaissance, nor with the prudent epicureanism of some aristocratic circles from the thirteenth century downward, nor, above all, with the passionate negation of ignorant heretics who had passed the boundary-line between mysticism and pantheism.
The naïve religious conscience of the multitude had no need of intellectual proofs in matters of faith. The mere presence of a visible image of things holy sufficed to establish their truth. No doubts intervened between the sight of all those pictures and statues—the persons of the Trinity, the flames of hell, the innumerable saints—and belief in their reality. All these conceptions became matters of faith in the most direct manner; they passed straight from the state of images to that of convictions, taking root in the mind as pictures clearly outlined and vividly coloured, possessing all the reality claimed for them by the Church, and even a little more.
Now, when faith is too directly connected with a pictured representation of doctrine, it runs the risk of no longer making ​qualitative distinctions between the nature and the degree of sanctity of the different elements of religion. The image by itself does not teach the faithful that one should adore God and only venerate the saints. Its psychological function is limited to creating a deep conviction of reality and a lively feeling of respect. It therefore became the task of the Church to warn incessantly against want of discrimination in this respect, and to preserve the purity of doctrine by explaining precisely what the image stood for. In no other sphere was the danger of luxuriance of religious thought caused by a vivid imagination more obvious.
Now, the Church did not fail to teach that all honours rendered to the saints, to relics, to holy places, should have God for their object. Although the prohibition of images in the second commandment of the Decalogue was abrogated by the new law, or limited to God the Father alone, the Church purposed, nevertheless, to maintain intact the principle of non adorabis ea neque coles: Images were only meant to show simple-minded people what to believe. They are the books of the illiterate, says Clemanges; a thought which Villon has expressed in the touching lines which he pute into his mother’s mouth:
“Femme je suis pourette et ancienne, Qui riens ne sçai; oncques lettre ne leurs; Au moustier voy dont suis paroissienne Paradis paint, où sont harpes et luz, Et ung enfer où dampnez sont boulluz: L’ung me fait paour, l’autre joye et liesse…”
The medieval Church was, however, rather heedless of the danger of a deterioration of the faith caused by the popular imagination roaming unchecked in the sphere of hagiology. An abundance of pictorial fancy, after all, furnished to the simple mind quite as much matter for deviating from pure doctrine as any personal interpretation of Holy Scripture. It is remarkable that the Church, so scrupulous in dogmatic matters, should have been so confiding and indulgent towards those who, sinning out of ignorance, rendered more homage ​to images than was lawful. It suffices, says Gerson, that they meant to do as the Church requires.
Thus towards the end of the Middle Ages an ultra-realistic conception of all that related to the saints may be noticed in the popular faith. The saints had become so real and such familiar characters of current religion that they became bound up with all the more superficial religious impulses. While profound devotion still centred on Christ and His mother, quite a host of artless beliefs and fancies clustered about the saints. Everything contributed to make them familiar and life-like. They were dressed like the people themselves. Every day one met “Messires” Saint Roch and Saint James in the persons of living plague patients and pilgrims. Down to the Renaissance the costume of the saints always followed the fashion of the times. Only then did Sacred Art, by arraying the saints in classical draperies, withdraw them from the popular imagination and place them in a sphere where the fancy of the multitude could no longer contaminate the doctrine in its purity.
The distinctly corporeal conception of the saints was accentuated by the veneration of their relics, not only permitted by the Church but forming an integral part of religion. It was inevitable that this pious attachment to material things should draw all hagiolatry into a sphere of crude and primitive ideas, and lead to surprising extremes. In the matter of relics the deep and straightforward faith of the Middle Ages was never afraid of disillusionment or profanation through handling holy things coarsely. The spirit of the fifteenth century did not differ much from that of the Umbrian peasants, who, about the year 1000, wished to kill Saint Romuald, the hermit, in order to make sure of his precious bones; or of the monks of Fossanuova, who, after Saint Thomas Aquinas had died in their monastery, in their fear of losing the relic, did not shrink from decapitating, boiling and preserving the body. During the lying in state of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, in 1231, a crowd of worshippers came and cut or tore strips of the linen enveloping her face; they cut off the hair, the nails, even the nipples. In 1392, King Charles VI of France, on the occasion of a solemn feast, was seen to distribute ribs of his ancestor, Saint Louis; to Pierre d’Ailly and to his uncles Berry and ​Burgundy he gave entire ribs; to the prelates one bone to divide between them, which they proceeded to do after the meal.
It may well be that this too corporeal and familiar aspect, this too clearly outlined shape, of the saints has been the very reason why they occupy so little space in the sphere of visions and supernatural experience. The whole domain of ghost-seeing, signs, spectres and apparitions, so crowded in the Middle Ages, lies mainly apart from the veneration of the saints. Of course, there are exceptions, such as Saint Michael, Saint Katherine and Saint Margaret appearing to Joan of Arc; and other instances might be added. But, generally speaking, popular phantasmagoria is full of angels, devils, shades of the dead, white women, but not of saints. Stories of apparitions of particular saints are, as a rule, suspect of having already undergone some ecclesiastical or literary interpretation. To the agitated beholder a phantom has no name and hardly a shape. In the famous vision of Frankenthal, in 1446, the young shepherd sees fourteen cherubim, all alike, who tell him they are the fourteen “Holy Martyrs,” to whom Christian iconography attributed such distinct and marked appearances. Where a primitive superstition does attach to the veneration of some saint, it retains something of the vague and formless character that is essential to superstition, as in the case of Saint Bertulph at Ghent, who can be heard rapping the sides of his coffin in S. Peter’s abbey “moult dru et moult fort” (very frequently and very loudly) as a warning of impending calamity.
The saint, with his clearly outlined figure, his well-known attributes and features as they were painted or carved in the churches, was wholly lacking in mystery. He did not inspire terror as do vague phantoms and the haunting unknown. The dread of the supernatural is due to the undefined character of its phenomena. As soon as they assume a clear-cut shape they are no longer horrible. The familiar figures of the saints produced the same sort of reassuring effect as the sight of a policeman in a foreign city. The complex of ideas connected with the saints constituted, so to say, a neutral zone of calm and domestic piety, between the ecstasy of contemplation and of the love of Christ on the one hand, and the horrors of demonomania on the other. It is perhaps not too bold to assert that the ​veneration of the saints, by draining off an overflow of religious effusion and of holy fear, acted on the exuberant piety of the Middle Ages as a salutary sedative.
The veneration of the saints has its place among the more outward manifestations of faith. It is subject to the influences of popular fancy rather than of theology, and they sometimes i deprive it of its dignity. The special cult of Saint Joseph towards the end of the Middle Ages is characteristic in this respect. It may be looked upon as the counterpart of the passionate adoration of the Virgin. The curiosity with which Joseph was regarded is a sort of reaction from the fervent cult of Mary. The figure of the Virgin is exalted more and more and that of Joseph becomes more and more of a caricature. Art portrays him as a clown dressed in rags; as such he appears in the diptych by Melchior Broederlam at Dijon. Literature, which is always more explicit than the graphic arts, achieves the feat of making him altogether ridiculous. Instead of admiring Joseph as the man most highly favoured of all, Deschamps represents him as the type of the drudging husband.
“Vous qui servez a femme et a enfans Aiez Joseph toudis en remembrance; Femme servit toujours tristes, dolans, Et Jhesu Crist garda en son enfance; A pié trotoit, son fardel sur sa lance; En plusieurs lieux est figuré ainsi, Lez un mulet, pour leur faire plaisance, Et si n’ot oncq feste en ce monde ci.”
And again, still more grossly:
“Qu’ot Joseph de povreté De durté De maleurté Quant Dieux nasqui! Maintefois l’a comporté Et monté Par bonté Aveo sa mére autressi,
Sur sa mule les ravi: Je le vi Paint ainsi; En Egipte en eat alé.
"Le bonhomme est painturé Tout lassé, Et troussé D'une cote et d'un barry: Un baston au coul posé, Vieil, usé Et rusé. Feste n'a en ce monde cy, Mais de lui Va le cri: C'est Joseph le rassoté."
This shows how familiarity led to irreverence of thought. Saint Joseph remained a comic type, in spite of the very special reverence paid to him. Doctor Eck, Luther's adversary, had to insist that he should not be brought on the stage, or at least that he should not be made to cook the porridge, "ne ecclesia Dei irrideatur." The union of Joseph and Mary always remained the object of a deplorable curiosity, in which profane speculation mingled with sincere piety. The Chevalier de la Tour Landry, a man of prosaic mind, explains it to himself in the following manner: "God wished that she should marry that saintly man Joseph, who was old and upright, for God wished to be born in wedlock, to comply with the current legal requirements, to avoid gossip."
An unpublished work of the fifteenth century represents the mystic marriage of the soul with the celestial spouse as if it were a middle-class wedding. "If it pleases you," says Jesus to the Father, "I shall marry and shall have a large bevy of children and relations." The Father fears a misalliance, but ​the Angel succeeds in persuading him that the betrothed-elect is worthy of the Son; on which the Father gives his consent in these terms:
“Prens la, car elle est plaisant Pour bien amer son doulx amant; Or prens de nos biens largement, Et luy en donne habondamment.”
There is no doubt of the seriously devout intention of this treatise. It is only an instance of the degree of triviality entailed by unbridled exuberance of fancy.
Every saint, by the possession of a distinct and vivid outward shape, had his own marked individuality, quite contrary to the angels, who, with the exception of the three famous archangels, acquired no definite appearance. This individual character of each saint was still more strongly accentuated by the special functions attributed to many of them. Now this specialization of the kind of aid given by the various saints was apt to introduce a mechanical element into the veneration paid to them. If, for instance, Saint Roch is specially invoked against the plague, almost inevitably too much stress came to be laid on his part in the healing, and the idea required by sound doctrine, that the saint wrought the cure only by means of his intercession with God, came in danger of being lost sight of. This was especially so in the case of the “Holy Martyrs” (les saints auxiliaires), whose number is usually given as fourteen, and sometimes as five, eight, ten, fifteen. Their veneration arose and spread towards the end of the Middle Ages.
“Ilz sont cinq sains, en la genealogie, Et cinq sainctes, a qui Dieu octria Benignement a la fin de leur vie, Que quiconques de cuer les requerra En tous perilz, que Dieu essaucera Leurs prieres, pour quelconque mesaise. Saiges est donc qui ces cinq servira, Jorges, Denis, Christofle, Gille et Blaise.”
As for the reason why this group was singled out among all the saints, it should be noticed that the greater number of them appear in art with some very striking attribute. Saint Achatius wore a crown of thorns; Saint Giles was accompanied by a hind, Saint George by a dragon; Saint Christopher was of gigantic stature; Saint Blaise was represented in a den of wild beasts; Saint Cyriac with a chained devil; Saint Denis carrying his head under his arm; Saint Erasmus being disembowelled by means of a windlass; Saint Eustace with a stag carrying a cross between its antlers; Saint Pantaleon with a lion; Saint Vitus in a cauldron; Saint Barbara with her tower; Saint Katherine with her wheel and sword; Saint Margaret with a dragon. It may well be that the special favour with which the Fourteen Auxiliary Saints were regarded was due, at least partially, to the very impressive character of their images.
​The names of several saints were inseparably bound up with divers disorders, and even served to designate them. Thus various cutaneous diseases were called Saint Anthony’s evil. Gout went by the name of Saint Maur’s evil. The terrors of the plague called for more than one saintly protector; Saint Sebastian, Saint Roch, Saint Giles, Saint Christopher, Saint Valentine, Saint Adrian, were all honoured in this capacity by offices, processions and fraternities. Now here lurked another menace to the purity of the faith. As soon as the thought of the disease, charged with feelings of horror and fear, presented itself to the mind, the thought of the saint sprang up at the same instant. How easily, then, did the saint himself become the object of this fear, so that to him was ascribed the heavenly wrath that unchained the scourge. Instead of unfathomable divine justice, it was the anger of the saint which seemed the cause of the evil and required to be appeased. Since he healed the evil, why should he not be its author? On these lines the transition from Christian ethic to heathen magic was only too easy. The Church could not be held responsible, unless we are to blame her carelessness regarding the adulteration of the pure doctrine in the minds of the ignorant.
There are numerous testimonies to show that the people sometimes really regarded certain saints as the authors of disorders, though it would be hardly fair to consider as such those oaths which almost attributed to Saint Anthony the part of an evil fire-demon. “Que Saint Antoine me arde” (May Saint Anthony burn me!), “Saint Antoine arde le tripot,” “Saint Antoine arde la monture” (Saint Anthony burn the brothel! Saint Anthony burn the beast!)—these are lines by Coquillart. So also Deschamps makes some poor fellow say:
“Saint Antoine me vent trop chier Son mal, le feu ou corps me boute;”
and thus apostrophizes a gouty beggar: “You cannot walk? All the better, you save the toll: Saint Mor ne te fera fremir” (Saint Maur will not make you tremble).
Robert Gaguin, who was not at all hostile to the veneration ​of the saints, in his De validorum per Franciam mendicantium varia astucia, describes beggars in these terms: “One falls on the ground expectorating malodorous spittle and attributes his condition to Saint John. Others are covered with ulcers through the fault of Saint Fiacrius, the hermit. You, O Damian, prevent them from making water, Saint Anthony burns their joints, Saint Pius makes them lame and paralysed.”
In one of his Colloquies Erasmus makes fun of this belief. One of the interlocutors asks whether in Heaven the saints are more malevolent than they were on earth. “Yes,” answers the other, “in the glory of Paradise the saints do not choose to be insulted. Who was sweeter than Saint Corneille, more compassionate than Saint Anthony, more patient than Saint John the Baptist, during their lives? And now what horrible maladies they send if they are not properly honoured!” Rabelais states that the lower class of preachers themselves represented Saint Sebastian to their congregation as the author of the plague and Saint Eutropius of dropsy. Henri Estienne has written of the same superstitions in the like manner. That they existed is thus clearly established.
"Ne faictes pas les dieux d'argent, D'or, de fust, de pierre ou d'arain, Qui font ydolatrer la gent. . . . Car l'ouvrage est forme plaisant; Leur painture dont je me plain, La beauté de l'or reluisant, Font croire à maint peuple incertain Que ce soient dieu pour certain, Et servent par pensées foles Telz ymages qui font caroles Es moustiers ou trop en mettons; C'est tresmal fait; a brief paroles, Telz simulacres n'aourons.
Prince, un Dieu croions seulement Et aourons parfaictement Aux champs, partout, car c'est raisons, Non pas faulz dieux, fer n'ayment, Pierres qui n'ont entendement: Telz simulacres n'aourons."
Perhaps we may consider the diligent propagation of the cult of guardian angels towards the end of the Middle Ages as a sort of unconscious reaction against the motley crowd of popular hagiology. Too large a part of the living faith had crystallized in the veneration of the saints, and thus there arose a craving for something more spiritual as an object of reverence and a source of protection. In addressing itself to the angel, vaguely conceived and almost formless, piety restored contact with the supernatural and with mystery. Once more it is Jean Gerson, the indefatigable worker for the purity of faith, whom we find perpetually recommending the cult of the guardian angel. But here also he had to combat unbridled curiosity, which threatened to submerge piety under a mass of commonplace details. And it was just in connection with this subject of angels, which was more or less unbroken ground, ​that numbers of delicate questions obtruded themselves. Do they never leave us? Do they know beforehand whether we shall be saved or lost? Had Christ a guardian angel? Will the Antichrist have one? Can the angel speak to our soul without visions? Do the angels lead us to good as devils lead us to evil?—Leave these subtle speculations to divines, concludes Gerson; let the faithful keep to simple and wholesome worship.
A hundred years after Gerson wrote, the Reformation attacked the cult of the saints, and nowhere in the whole contested area did it meet with less resistance. In strong contrast with the belief in witchcraft and demonology, which fully maintained their ground in Protestant countries, both among the clergy and the laity, the saints fell without a blow being struck in their defence. This was possibly due to the fact that nearly everything connected with the saints had become caput mortuum. Piety had depleted itself in the image, the legend, the office. All its contents had been so completely expressed that mystic awe had evaporated. The cult of the saints was no longer rooted in the domain of the unimaginable. In the case of demonology, these roots remained as terribly strong as ever.
When, therefore, Catholic Reform had to re-establish the cult of the saints, its first task was to prune it; to cut down the whole luxuriant growth of medieval imagination and establish severer discipline, so as to prevent a reflorescence.
* ↑ So much I enjoy myself.
* ↑ If my face is pale.
* ↑ The armed man.
* ↑ Then to the sound of the trumpet God shall open His general and grand audit office.
* ↑ Save the virginity.
* ↑ Not that I want to deify princes.
* ↑ “Kiss me,” “Red noses.”
* ↑ In bygone times people used to be Gentle in church, On their knees in humility Close beside the altar, With meekly uncovered head, But at present, like beasts, They too often come to the altar With hood and hat on their heads.
* ↑ If I often go to church, It is all for seeing the fair one Fresh as a new-blown rose.
* ↑ There is none so mean but says, I deny God and His mother.
* ↑ I am a poor old woman who knows nothing; I never could read. In my parish church I see Paradise painted, where are harps and lutes, And a hell, where the damned are boiled. The one frightens me, the other brings joy and mirth.
* ↑ You who serve a wife and children Always bear Joseph in mind; He served his wife, gloomily and mournfully, And he guarded Jesus Christ in his infancy; He went on foot with his bundle slung on his staff; In several places he is pictured thus, Beside a mule to give them pleasure, And so he had never any amusement in this world.
* ↑ What poverty Joseph suffered What hardships What misery When God was born! Many a time he has carried him, And placed him In his goodness With his mother, too, On his mule, and took them with him: I saw him Painted thus; He went into Egypt. The good man is painted Quite exhausted, And dressed in A frock and a striped garment, A stick across his shoulder, Old, spent And broken. For him there was no amusement in this world, But of him People say—That is Joseph, the fool.
* ↑ Le Livre de Crainte Amoureuse, by Jean Berthelemy, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS. français, 1875.
* ↑ Take her, for she is pleasing and fit To love her sweet bridegroom; Now take plenty of our possessions, And give them to her in abundance.
* ↑ There are five saints in the genealogy, And five female saints to whom God granted Benignantly at the end of their lives, That whosoever shall invoke their help with all his heart In all dangers, that He will hear their prayers, In all disorders whatsoever. He therefore is wise who serves these five, George, Denis, Christopher, Giles and Blaise.
* ↑ Saint Anthony sells me his evil all too dear, He stokes the fire in my body.
* ↑ Do not make gods of silver, Of gold, of wood, of stone or of bronze, That lead people to idolatry. . . . Because the work has a pleasant shape; Their colouring of which I complain, The beauty of shining gold, Make many ignorant people believe That these are God! for certain, And they serve by foolish thoughts Such images as stand about In churches where they place too many of them That is very ill done; in short Let us not adore such counterfeits. . . . Prince, let us only believe in one God And let us adore him to perfection In the fields, everywhere, for this is right, No false gods, of iron or of stone, Stones which have no understanding: Let us not adore such counterfeits.