Bernard of Cluny by John Balnaves.
For further information contact ejb@prosentient.com.au
Home
| Intro
| Ch.1
| Ch.2
| Ch.3
| Ch.4
| Ch.5
| Ch.6a
| Ch.6b
| Ch.6c
| Ch.7
| Appendices
| Bibliography |
PDF (full thesis)
CONCLUSION
The genre of complaint emerged in part from the Hebrew Scriptures,
especially Job, Ecclesiastes and the Psalms.1
From that source especially derived much of the complaint about man and his
perennial frailties. But it emerged in at least equal measure from classical
literature, especially Juvenal and Horace. General complaint about the human
condition is not lacking in the classical authors, but they added special
elements of satire which are not found in the Bible. John Peter argues that
"complaint displaced satire, pushed it to one side."2 His point is that, with the spread of Christianity through Europe,
"the mode of Satire ... became transmuted into the related mode of Complaint,"
and it was not until the sixteenth century and "the conscious rediscovery of
Latin satire" that satire reasserted itself.3
The poetry of Bernard of Morlaix and his contemporaries
shows that the satire of the twelfth century is significantly different from
that of classical times, and Bernard's poems illustrate John Peter's point that
Christianity offers a way of dealing with the subjects of complaint, and a hope
of heaven, and that this way and
this hope pervade twelfth-century satire. That is
not to suggest that all twelfth-century complaint literature is explicitly
Christian in tone or content. Some of the examples of the works of Bernard's
contemporaries, quoted in Chapter 3, show that that is not the case, and the
point has been made, especially in relation to the vernacular literature of the
period, by Peter Dronke.4
The genre of complaint became established by the twelfth century,
expressing itself in various forms, such as planctus,
contemptus mundi and estates
satire, although, lacking a word to describe it, Bernard and his contemporaries
did not distinguish it from satire. How easily the genre can be misread is
illustrated by Samuel Macauley Jackson's remark that the De contemptu mundi is "richly worth reading as showing that as early
as the twelfth century there was a crying need of reformation in the Church of
Rome in the estimation of at least one monk whose poem was frequently copied and
widely circulated."5 H.C. Hoskier entitles his
edition of the De contemptu mundi
"a bitter
satirical poem of 300 lines upon the morals of the XIIth century." He dedicates
it to "all lovers of mediaeval Latin verse and to the memory of Bernard, one of
the bravest men who ever lived." In his preface, he refers to "the full force of
Bernard's
attack on the evils of his day," adding that "the criticisms are so sincere
and the language so unequivocal, that we can readily perceive why the poem was
not permitted free circulation, and why the editions have passed out of
view."6 The De contemptu
mundi was misread in a similar way in Reformation times.7
In point of fact, there was nothing exceptional
about Bernard's criticism of the church. All his criticisms can be parallelled
in the writings of his contemporaries. The themes, the topics, the imagery, even
the puns and other word play can be found in a wide variety of authors of his
time. The anticlericalism of Bernard and his contemporaries was not seen as an
attack upon Catholic orthodoxy and was not regarded as reprehensible by the
church. It was, indeed, expressed by clerics. Stringent criticism of the church
was both widespread and acceptable.
It was perhaps in part a
misreading of the complaint genre that gave rise to the description of the
twelfth century as a "renaissance." Concepts of humanism, of interest in man and
nature, of an emergence of individualism, of an interest in empirical enquiry,
of secularism, of anticlericalism, and so forth, can easily be projected back
into the twelfth century because of the range of interests conventionally dealt with in complaint literature, without a recognition of the different perceptions of the fifteenth and twelfth centuries.
Bernard gets brief mention in the works of many writers
about the twelfth-century renaissance. Haskins describes the De contemptu mundi as the source of "a series of hymns which have
acquired a profound place in the worship of the English-speaking world."8 He briefly discusses Bernard's work in the context
of the development of religious poetry in the twelfth century, which was, he
says, "a great age, probably the culminating age, of religious poetry."9 He discusses Bernard in the company of Peter
Abelard and Adam of St. Victor, rather than of Hildebert of Lavardin or Walter
of Chatillon (or even of Walter Map or Nigel Longchamps), with whom Bernard has,
in some ways, rather more in common. And, though he recognises the importance of
satirical verse in the twelfth century, he does not refer to that element in
Bernard's works. Andre Wilmart's article on the poems in the Vatican manuscript
was published in 1933,10 so it is understandable
that Haskins, writing in 1927, mentions only the
De
contemptu mundi and quotes only from those parts popularised by J. M. Neale,
Charles Lawrence Ford and others. His general conclusion about the Latin poetry
of the twelfth century is that the various national literatures, then beginning
to emerge, all had their roots in the Latin literature of the period. "The twelfth century is the great period of divergence between Latin and vernacular, the culmination of the international poetry of the Middle Ages with its burst of activity in all fields of expression, its new forms of versification which make their fortune later in the vernacular." He sees this development as similar to that of the Italian Renaissance: "a revival of ancient learning and also of ancient art, but still more an age of new life and new knowledge which carry us well beyond the ancients."11
Renaissance and renewal
in the twelfth century, edited by Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable, pays
scant attention to Bernard. The index confuses Bernard of Morlaix with Bernard
of Cluny, the author of the Ordo Cluniacensis.12 Only one of the contributors mentions Bernard of
Morlaix. Janet Martin, dealing with classicism and style in Latin literature,
says that "some varieties of rhymed hexameter amount to a new kind of verse, as
in the versus tripertiti dactylici in which Bernard
of Cluny (fl.1140) wrote his long and celebrated
poem on the evils of the times."13 Apart from a
mention of Bernard's use of Elysios in his rebuke of
Vergil for his erroneous description of hell,14
that is the only discussion of Bernard in the whole volume.
Erwin Panofsky is primarily concerned with art rather than literature, but
he notices Bernard of Morlaix in relation to twelfth-century opposition to
classical learning, "an opposition which, paradoxically and characteristically,
tends to speak with the very voice which it endeavours to silence" and which was
"expressed by Bernard of Cluny (`Bernardus Morlanensis') in verses whose
tripping, purely dactylic rhythm and catchy double rhymes (both internal and
terminal) almost conceal the fact that they are, technically speaking, carefully
constructed hexameters, each line consisting of exactly seventeen
syllables."15 He quotes a few lines of the
passage beginning "Sed stylus ethnicus," which was discussed in Chapter 5, page
291 and which is better interpreted as a complaint about accepting classical
writers as authorities rather than, as Panofsky suggests, a complaint about
classical learning.16
Ernst Robert Curtius is concerned with the wider theme of European
literature and the Latin middle ages, but he pays considerable attention to the
renaissance of the twelfth century. He discusses the "powerful satire De contemptu mundi" in the
context of Eros and morality. "A fervent piety, which longs ecstatically for the
heavenly Jerusalem, fills his [Bernard's] soul. His monkish mind, turned to the
other world, is deeply grieved to perceive the corruption of the times. In his
poem he he not only inveighs against impiety,
sodomy and other vices of the age, but curses love
and womankind." Curtius compares Bernard of
Morlaix with Bernard of Clairvaux, the anonymous
author of the
Concilium in Monte Romarici,
and Bernardus Silvestris. "Thus about the middle of the twelfth century we find
in four works four different attitudes towards Eros: the ascetic ideal curses
him, profligacy debases him, mysticism spiritualizes him, and gnosticism
consecrates him."17 Misogyny is the only
characteristic of Bernard of Morlaix noted by Helen Waddell.18
Bernard gets more detailed attention in works
which do not entertain concepts of a twelfth-century renaissance. F.J.E. Raby
devotes four pages to him in his History of
Christian-Latin poetry, where he considers the devotional aspects of the De contemptu mundi and the Mariale in the context of the poets of Cluny and in the company of Odo
and Peter the Venerable.19 In Raby's History of secular Latin poetry in the middle ages
Bernard gets more than five pages, devoted mostly to the De contemptu mundi as a satirical poem. But Raby mentions also the Mariale and he draws attention to, though he does not
discuss, "other poems by Bernard
discovered by Dom Wilmart."20 But Raby is not a
writer who, like Haskins, Martin, Panofsky, Curtius and even Waddell,21 was concerned to put Bernard in the context of a
twelfth-century renaissance. He describes the developments of the twelfth
century without calling them manifestations of a renaissance and without any
reference to the fifteenth century.22
Joseph de Ghellinck, writing in 1955, discusses the De contemptu mundi (and mentions other of Bernard's
poems) in the context of twelfth-century satirical poetry.23 Like Raby, de Ghellinck does not find it necessary to refer to a
"renaissance." The title of his work is L'essor de la
litterature latine au XIIe siecle. "Essor" suggests flight or growth rather
than renaissance. "Boom," in the sense of sudden activity, might be an
appropriate word. The boom was not a renaissance, but a culmination of the Latin
literary tradition. It was followed by a decline of Latin literature. "A travers
tout le moyen age du reste, deja en plein XIIe siecle, ce processus de
desagregation ne cesse pas de menacer le latin."24
Jill Mann, in a somewhat similar way, does not emphasise the concept of
renaissance in a paper on the Latin satirical poems of the middle ages. She
concentrates on the twelfth century because it saw "una grande fioritura di
scritti satirici di tutti i tipi e raggiunse livelli mai superati nel
Medioevo."25 She finds it useful to begin with
Bernard's De contemptu mundi,
because it reflects
the conventional themes and modes of expression of medieval satire.
"Boom" would seem to be a more useful, if a less dignified
term than "renaissance" to apply to the culture of the twelfth century as
illustrated by Bernard of Morlaix. There was monastic reform, but the monastic
life seems rather to have reached a peak and to have begun its long decline. If
there was a rebirth of the spirit of Saint Gregory, it came rather with the
friars in the thirteenth century than in the twelfth century, and the same may
be said about attitudes towards women. The complaint literature of the twelfth
century, the satire and the anticlericalism, all began in the Latin tradition,
where they were shaped and whence they were passed on to the vernacular
literatures.
The anticlericalism of the twelfth century was
in no sense secular. Twelfth-century complaints against the papacy, though they
provided Jungmann diputes the authorship of the latter, and places it firmly in
the twelfth century (The Mass of the Roman rite, Blackrock, Four Courts Press,
1986 (first published Vienna, Herder, 1949), p.439).
fuel for the
reformers of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, were not of the same genre
as the complaints of the Reformation. Bernard's treatment of the end of the
world and of heaven and hell do not suggest a renaissance but a continuing
tradition, some of which, like the Apocalypse of
Peter, may have been lost in subsequent centuries. Bernard's estates satire
is among the first of its kind. Although it had some roots in Horace and Cicero,
and some elements are found in the eleventh century,26 it was essentially a new creation rather than a revival.
Similarly, in metre and rhyme, and also in allegory, there were genuinely new
developments in the twelfth century which it would be misleading to describe as
a renaissance. Even in the area of the love lyric, which has not been discussed
here because Bernard throws no light on it, the boom of the Latin tradition may
have had as much influence as the birth of the vernacular.27
Urban T. Holmes, discussing the idea of a
twelfth-century renaissance, denies that a renaissance has anything to do with
rebirth. "It is a sudden increase of enthusiasm and intensity in a given stream
of culture."28 He stresses the importance of the
vernacular literatures in the twelfth century's "vigorous awakening of cultural
enthusiasm, in which dialectic, theology,
legal studies, vernacular literature of a
worldly type, decorative art, and Latin poetry rose to new heights."29 The effect of his discussion is not so much to
clarify the terms "renaissance" and "humanism" as to show the problems of their
application to the twelfth century. By contrast, Beryl Smalley investigates
ecclesiastical attitudes to novelty in the twelfth century, but she does not
find any self-conscious renewal or rebirth, and she does find it necessary to
use the concept of "renaissance."
My provisional dossier on churchmen's
attitudes to novelty will have shown that they became more positive in the
period c1100-1250. Conservatives and reactionaries are a constant factor in
history. Spokesmen in favour of novelty won a verbal victory at least in
this century and a half. They won it after a long and painful battle of
words, and more than words only. Builders of institutions went about their
work and contributed novelties without making a fuss. Lawyers and scholars
took novelties in their stride.30
To describe the culture of the twelfth century as
a renaissance, especially as a lesser renaissance than the Renaissance
proper,31 is to do the Latin literary tradition
which culminated in the twelfth century less than justice. There was not a
revival or renewal of the Latin literary tradition in the twelfth century, so
much as a continuation and culmination. It was a
"genuine tradition," not an "invented tradition."32 The scholars of the Renaissance of the fifteenth
century undoubtedly advanced the cause of learning through the recovery and
editing of Greek and Latin texts and philological and textual studies of them.
But their contribution in terms of production of literary works in Latin is less
certain. C.S. Lewis points out that, if we take for our criterion the judgement
of posterity, we find that "The medieval philosophy is still read as philosophy,
the history as history, the songs as songs; the hymns are still in use ... It
would be hard to think of one single text in humanists' Latin, except the Utopia, of which we can say the same."33 Even Coluccio Salutati, "the undisputed leader of the humanist
movement for thirty-two years," but of whom "few have heard" in modern times,
might have been as well known as Petrarch and Boccaccio if he had written in the
vernacular.34 G.G. Coulton argued that Latin, as
a universal scholarly language, became a positive hindrance to effective
communication during the later middle ages.35
There was a decline also, after the twelfth century, in the
teaching of classical literature in the universities. John Garland's plea, in
about 1230, for legislation to re-establish the
teaching of the ancient classics at Paris was unsuccessful.36 This was partly because classical studies were
crowded out by other intellectual interests, especially philosophy and theology.
But an important factor also was the plethora of excellent Latin literature
written in the twelfth century. "Just as the pagan poets were often crowded out
of the schools by early Christian poets such as Prudentius and Sedulius, so now
the works of modern authors frequently displaced the classics or at least were
read side by side with them."37
But if it is possible to see the twelfth century as a "boom" followed by a
"bust" as far as classical learning is concerned, it is also possible to see it,
from other aspects, as the end of the late patristic period, marked
traditionally by volume 217 of Migne's Patrologia
Latina, and the beginning, in the thirteenth century, of the great
scholastic philosophical and theological developments. The label
"twelfth-century renaissance" is not helpful in either regard.
Credit for establishment of the usage of the term "renaissance" (with a
lower case R) to signify similar revivals in other historical periods, and
especially in the twelfth century, has generally been accorded to Charles Homer
Haskins, whose
Renaissance of the twelfth century was published in 1927. Haskins' is certainly the first scholarly and
detailed treatment of the subject, but as early as 1873, in a collection of
critical essays aimed at a more popular audience, Walter Pater wrote:
The history of the Renaissance ends in
France and carries us away from Italy to the beautiful cities of the country
of the Loire. But it was in France also, in a very important sense, that the
Renaissance had begun; and French writers ... have often dwelt on this
notion of a Renaissance in the end of the twelfth, and the beginning of the
thirteenth century - a Renaissance within the limits of the Middle Ages, a
brilliant but in part abortive effort to do for human life and the human
mind what was afterwards done in the fifteenth."38
Walter Pater's vision of the
medieval scholars who did not realise that the fifteenth century had not yet
arrived is reminiscent of the monks at the time of the dissolution of
monasteries in England, who "thought it was still the middle ages."39 In its extreme form, this contrast between the
ignorance of the middle ages and the enlightenment
of the Renaissance might be thought to have been discredited. But it flourishes
among popular writers. William Manchester, for example, as recently as 1992,
thought it worthwhile to explain how the deadened and superstitious medieval
mind was dragged into the light of the Renaissance.
Shackled in ignorance, disciplined by fear,
and sheathed in superstition [the people of the middle ages] trudged into
the sixteenth century in the clumsy, hunched, pigeon-toed gait of rickets
victims, their faces, pocked by smallpox, turned blindly towards the future
they thought they knew - gullible, pitiful innocents who were about to be
swept up in the most powerful, incomprehensible, irresistible vortex since
Alaric had led his Visigoths and Huns across the Alps, fallen on Rome, and
extinguished the lamps of learning a thousand years before.40
William A.
Nitze remarks satirically that "the men of the twelfth century had none of that
awareness of a Cimmerian night from which - as Rabelais wrote his friend
Tiraqueau in 1532 - humanity had emerged."41
Marie Dominique Chenu, discussing the medieval concepts of translatio studii and translatio imperii,
points out:
The modern term "Middle Ages," set up as a
foil to the "Renaissance" and lexically suggesting little more than a dead
center, stripped such transmissions of their responsiveness to evolving
conditions; indeed, it sold short the very concept of "renaissance" for this
term now no longer expressed the capacity for continual renovation
characteristic of western Christendom, except as comprised within some
external imitation of Antiquity."42
Christopher
Brooke, addressing the problem of the twelfth-century renaissance, says, "It
must be firmly stated at the outset that the phrase "the twelfth-century
Renaissance" has no precise meaning ... It is vain to search for a definition.
Historians love to use labels of this kind; and in the hands of a master they
can assume real meaning ... But most discussions of these terms lapse into arid
semantics ..."43 Gerhart B. Ladner offers a lame
pretext for retaining a term whose only excuse for survival is that it is
conventional and virtually meaningless. He sees "no good reason to reject
Haskins's title The Renaissance of the Twelfth
Century, which in any case seems now well protected by a tacit statute of
limitations on changing widely accepted terms."44 R.W. Southern similarly defends the term.
For the last twenty-five years, since the
appearance of Haskins' book with this title, the phrase has had a wide
currency, but recently Professor Nitze has attacked the use of the phrase as
misleading and inexact. I have no wish to enter into this controversy, which
in any case seems to attach too much importance to a mere term of
convenience which can mean almost anything we choose to make it mean: all I
wish to refer to is the large and complex activity in literature, learning
and the arts which drew on many sources, yet expressed an outlook which one
feels at once to be new and subtly yet unmistakably coherent. As a
portmanteau description of this activity I would stand by Haskins in
believing that the term "Renaissance" is no more misleading than any other
word. It achieves indeed the sort of sublime meaninglessness which is
required in words of high but uncertain import.45
Utterances which have no meaning, which are not empirically
verifiable and therefore cannot be discussed in terms of their truth or falsity,
are useful in some contexts. They convey emotions or aspirations or experiences.
They may even have a place in historical writing, provided that their use is
understood by the reader. Livy, for example, uses them to write the history of
his country from the point of view of a patriotic Roman. Their value, that is to
say, lies in their ability to convey a set of assumptions or a standpoint. If it
is clear that the terms are of that kind, and if the assumptions or the
standpoint are clearly seen, the use of these terms of high but uncertain import
is not misleading. Unfortunately the portmanteau of "the twelfth-century
renaissance" carries articles which are seldom declared.
A study of the works of Bernard of Morlaix certainly confirms Southern's
view that the twelfth century saw a large and complex activity in literature,
learning and the arts which drew on many sources, yet expressed an outlook which
one feels at once to be new and subtly yet unmistakably coherent. But it is far
from clear that this phenomenon may be described, without danger of being
misleading, as a renaissance. As early as 1910, Louis John Paetow, who sat at
the feet of Haskins himself, considered the term "twelfth-century renaissance"
unfortunate. Unhappily, his view did not prevail.46
The term
"Renaissance" generated the notion of a renewal of the glories of classical
antiquity after the prolonged darkness of the "middle ages." The term "middle
ages" carries those connotations with it. Eva Matthews Sanford asks, "If the men
of the Renaissance had not put mediaevalists on the defensive by insistence on
their rescue of the world and man from mediaeval ignorance and oblivion, should
we feel the need of defining the earlier period [the twelfth century] as a
renaissance?"47 Fred C. Robinson points out that
"medieval is most often used in Modern English
simply as a vague pejorative term meaning 'outmoded,' 'hopelessly antiquated,'
or even simply 'bad.' Renaissance and
classical, although they too refer to long-ago periods
of history, are never used in this pejorative way."48 Even scholars, and even classical scholars, cannot escape from
the tyranny of that usage. Gavin Betts, complaining about the decline of
classical studies at the Universities of Melbourne and Monash, says, "One
wonders what the consequences for Western civilisation would have been if
economic rationalism had been fashionable in 15th and 16th century Europe.
Perhaps we would have been spared the Renaissance and the Middle Ages would
still be with us."49
E.H. Gombrich points out that, "Whether
we know it or not, we always approach the past with some preconceived
ideas."50 The trouble with the terms
"renaissance" and "middle ages" is that they have built into them a particular
view of a pattern of history, in which the middle ages constitute "a mere
interval of barbarity between two great ages of human achievement and
progress."51 Even if we do not take that view,
even if we explicitly reject it, we cannot get away with the use of the terms on
the grounds that they are harmless and not misleading. They carry their baggage
with them. The notion of a renaissance of the twelfth century seems to arise
because we think we need to explain how people in that benighted age could
possibly have been as bright as they evidently were. There must have been a
renaissance, even if, since it occurred in the middle ages, it had necessarily
to be abortive.
Bernard of Morlaix, who may have
hailed from Morley in Norfolk, was a monk at the Cluniac priory of Saint-Denis
de Nogent-le-Rotrou, where he may have been prior from about 1120 to 1160.52 He went to Rome with a petition to Pope Eugenius
III in about 1146. In a number of poems, he draws upon a range of cultural
resources and reflects some of the preoccupations and anxieties of his age.
Those preoccupations and
anxieties are religious, moral, institutional and cultural. Some of them are
specific to contemporary monastic culture. Bernard is addressing a monastic
audience and he is concerned to encourage his brethren to take their monastic
vocation not just as a routine job but as a true conversion of life. He has a
particular concern with what he regards as the aberrations of the Cistercians.
The themes which Bernard takes up are all commonly expressed in the Latin
literature of complaint, which reached a peak in the twelfth century. Estates
satire, in the form of complaint about such things as the Roman Curia, the
clergy and women, forms a large part of Bernard's work, as it does of the
satirical literature of his time. Apocalyptic themes, the end of the world and
heaven and hell, also play an important part in Bernard's poems, as they do in
the complaint literature of his contemporaries.
The
cultural resources on which Bernard draws include classical Latin literature,
the Vulgate (and through the Vulgate some elements of Hebrew literary
traditions), the writings of the Fathers and the works of his contemporaries.
His classical learning is not superficial. He knows some Latin authors of
antiquity well, and some traditional classical themes, especially the golden age
and the golden mean, affect him deeply. He took part in the extraordinary
developments in metre and rhyme and in allegory which were a feature of the
twelfth century.
But Bernard's poems convey no sense of a "renaissance."
The concept itself raises an array of problems, theoretical and methodological.
More importantly, its application to the twelfth century is seriously
misleading. The Latin literary tradition of the twelfth century was a genuine
tradition, not a revival.