Thought and Culture in the Thirteenth Century

by Diane Moczar

How to discuss, briefly, the civilization of one of the greatest periods in history? How to summarize the great variety of masterpieces and pioneering work in all areas that characterized the 1200s, or do justice to even one of the great figures? Well, it can't be done. All I can do here is to sketch a few features of high medieval culture, and mention a few names.

We tend to consider the masterpieces of medieval thought, art, and institutions as comfortable, familiar, venerable parts of our Catholic heritage. They are reliable precisely because they have been around so long. At the time of their creation, however, what was most striking about them was their originality. Here is William of Tocco gushing about the teaching of St. Thomas: "For in his lectures he put out new subdivisions, inventing a new and clear way of drawing conclusions, and bringing new reasons into them so that no one who had heard him teach new doubts and allay them by new arguments would have doubted that God had illumined with rays of new light one who became straightaway of such sure judgment that he did not hesitate to teach and write new opinions which God had deigned newly to inspire." This was all entirely too new for many of his contemporaries, and both Thomas and his friend St. Bonaventure got into hot water with university and ecclesiastical authorities. We cannot get into that topic, but it is well to recall that novelty was a key feature of medieval achievements. The newness of Gothic architecture, with its unprecedented technical challenges, must have fascinated architects. (It could also frustrate them, especially when they pushed a spire too high and it fell down.) It was a new thing for whole communities, from lords and ladies, to merchants and peasant families, to be actually helping to create these sacred masterpieces, all of them wheel barrowing stone, hauling sand, and setting up columns under the direction of the master builder. How many times in history has the ordinary parishioner been able to look at his church and know not only that it is beautiful and a real masterpiece but also that he helped build it? (Try not to be bitter about the doughnut-shaped monstrosity with which your parish is afflicted, and turn your gaze on a book of good photographs of thirteenth-century churches. They soothe the soul.)

My favorite Gothic church is the small jewel box built by St. Louis to house the Crown of Thorns he had brought from Constantinople. Chartres, Notre Dame, Reims may be more magnificent, but the Sainte Chapelle is something special, and the peculiar thing is that photographs give little idea of its stunning impact. It is a short walk from Notre Dame in Paris, its spire alone visible above the surrounding medieval and modern government buildings. When you enter it (and it must be a sunny day) you are in a low, gilded and painted small church; it is something of a disappointment after Notre Dame, and you begin to think of lunch. Then you see a small staircase in the corner, up which people are trudging; there is no sign but you follow them. You emerge into a ravishing sea of pure light: it is as if you were, in the words of a contemporary, "introduced into one of Heaven's most beautiful rooms." This is the upper church, with the walls seemingly made entirely of light, reflected through over a thousand stained-glass panels depicting biblical history, with a few devoted to the arrival of the Crown of Thorns in France. It is breathtaking, and unlike many buildings that are exactly like their photographs, this one is totally different. It must be experienced.

The music of the cathedrals was also new: chant was broadening into polyphony, with its new intertwining of voices. Sacred drama — another new thing — was moving out of the church and into the town, where it developed into the tragedies and comedies of later Western theater. Poetry and song in the languages of Europe — rather than in Latin — were also new, and produced masterpieces; Dante was born in the thirteenth century. Political thought had a striking development in this century; the principles of just government and society were explored by John of Salisbury, St. Thomas, and numerous other writers. The concept of individual rights is generally considered to be an Enlightenment idea, because nobody listens to medievalists. As Professor Brian Tierney has shown in The Idea of Natural Rights (1997), however, the concept is both Christian and medieval.

Similarly, science was supposedly born in the seventeenth century with Galileo (actually an indifferent astronomer who was wildly wrong about several things). In fact, as has recently (and grudgingly) been recognized, modern science was born in the Middle Ages. St. Albert the Great, teacher of St. Thomas, was the first botanist since ancient times; Roger Bacon pioneered the science of optics. (He may not have invented glasses, as was earlier thought, but somebody else did about the same time, for which I am devoutly grateful.) The study of physics by English scholars evolved in the next century into the field of mathematical physics that anticipated Newton. Yet we are told over and over again that the Middle Ages were a time of blind superstition when people just couldn't think straight — a neat description of the modern ignoramuses who tell us so.

There is more — so much more — but it is time to investigate what Dom Gueranger, discussing in his Liturgical Year the institution of the feast of Corpus Christi, alludes to as the "coldness" that made such a feast desirable. He shows how, in more fervent times, the people participated so wholeheartedly and with such faith in the Mass — with all the ceremony and elaborate liturgy with which it was then celebrated — that a separate feast honoring the Sacred Species was not needed. By the middle of the thirteenth century, it was. Why? Various reasons have been given for the subtle shift in mentality that chilled spirituality. Monsignor Hughes, in his History of the Church, seems to fault the papacy for its increasing centralization, involvement in politics, and financial exactions that left the faithful disaffected.

Dom Gueranger sees other reasons for the coldness that was becoming evident in the decline of enthusiastic public and social participation in the Eucharistic sacrifice. The preoccupation of the popes with the German threat may have kept them from pursuing moral reforms more vigorously; certainly clerical scandals had not been eliminated, and "The disorders of the sanctuary necessarily brought about relaxation in the people. They grew wearied of receiving the heavenly food from hands that were, but too often, unworthy ones." One indication of lack of devotion to the Holy Eucharist is that the Lateran Council of 1215 had to oblige the faithful under serious penalties to communicate even once a year.

Another factor in the erosion of Catholic fervor was the growth of heresy. There were many heretical movements during the Middle Ages, but the most formidable and destructive was probably Catharism, mentioned in the previous article. It had penetrated the Balkans, Italy, and Austria before gaining a foothold in southern France. In its bizarre worldview, harking back to ancient Persian dualism rather than to any form of Christianity, spirit was good, created by God, and matter was evil, created by the Devil; therefore marriage and procreation were evil, though it seems sexual perversions were tolerated to some extent. The taking of any kind of oath was forbidden, which meant that no feudal bond, legal commitment, vow, or sworn allegiance to a ruler had any meaning. The goal of your life as a Cathar was to negate the material part of you so that you became one of the "Perfect" — distinguished from the deplorable mass of second-class Cathars who were always trying to eat, drink, and have a good time in spite of how evil those things were. On their deathbeds they would receive the Cathar sacrament, the Consolamentum, and promptly depart for the Cathar heaven. If you were one of the Perfect, however, you took your hatred of matter to such an extreme that you starved yourself to death. Your friends would helpfully keep food from you during your "dissolution," known as the Endura, forcibly restraining you if necessary. One of the most horrible aspects of Catharism, described in Le Roy Laduries' Montaillou, was the starvation of infants who, in death, supposedly become part of the "Perfect." Cathars were also willing to eliminate their enemies by swifter means, as in the case of at least one papal legate sent to treat with them who was murdered on the way.

How to account for the attraction of this creepy cult for so many thirteenth-century Catholics? Here we glimpse a little of the "coldness" that had seeped into the Catholic mind by this time. Particularly in Languedoc, practice had become lax and fervor declined into tepidity. Priests and religious often led visibly corrupt lives — the Gregorian reforms of the earlier period may not have made it to the easy-going, pleasant-living residents of the warm South. (I can't help thinking of my native California, where life is easy and pleasant and the cults and mentality are weird beyond belief.) Even many non-Cathars admired the stern morals of the "Perfect," which contrasted so starkly with Catholic clerical corruption. It is also apparent that the view of matter as evil negated the doctrine of Holy Eucharist, which may have influenced the decline in Catholic belief and devotion.

The Feast of Corpus Christi, devotion to the Sacred Heart, and the great preachers of the new mendicant orders, such as St. Dominic and St. Anthony, did much to combat the apathy of the times, and there is no denying their success. It seems to me, however, that there is another reason for the coldness that caused such unease and anxiety among the saints. We shall examine it in the next issue.

Reading Suggestions

Many of the works on the Middle Ages mentioned in earlier articles are relevant for the thirteenth century also. In addition to them, the biographies of the saints of the century are a nearly inexhaustible source of good reading. Chesterton's little biographies of St. Francis and St. Thomas Aquinas are classics, as is Johannes Jorgensen's more detailed St. Francis of Assisi. Mary Purcell's St. Anthony and his Times is a readable and appealing work; so is Scholars and Mystics by Sister Mary Jeremy, O.P., on St. Gertrude the Great, her friend St. Mechtild, and other sisters of their convent. Like all of Regine Pernoud's works, Blanche of Castile, the life of St. Louis' mother, is both scholarly and readable. Medieval science and technology have been so slighted in the past that I should mention at least works on those aspects of medieval life: Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel by Frances and Joseph Gies (HarperCollins, 1994) is an interesting survey with some good illustrations. An older work by Lynn White, Jr., is Medieval Technology and Social Change (published in 1962 but reprinted since). Although perhaps partially outdated, it includes stimulating observations; it also sums up rather neatly a discussion of the connection between the increase in grains and legumes in the diet and population and town growth: "In the full sense of the vernacular, the Middle Ages, from the tenth century onward, were full of beans."

Diane Moczar is a writer and historian now teaching at Northern Virginia Community College.

© Keep the Faith, Inc.

This item 6927 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org