Man in Medieval Thought

MAN IN MEDIEVAL THOUGHT W RITING of twelfth century Bernard Sylvestris, Miss Waddell has pointed to the conflict of poet . and philosopher. "The poet in Bernard . . . has his moments of rebellion against the muddy vesture of decay, of lament for the 'poor soul, centre of my sinful earth,' for 'the gross body's treason.' ... 'From splendour to darkness from Heaven to the Kingdom of Dis, from eternity to the bodies by the House of the Crab are these spirits doomed to descend, arid pure in their simple essence, they shudder at the dull and blind habitations which they see prepared.' But when he comes to the making of man in that place of green woods and falling streams, he holds, plainly and determinedly, the dignity of his creation. . .. Only, he would have a man fix his eye upon the stars, and his term ended, thither let him go . . . 'perfect from the perfect, beautiful from the beautiful, eternal from the eternal: 'from the intellectual world the sensible world was born: full was that which bore it, and its plenitude fashioned it full.' The war between the spirit and the flesh has ended in a Trace 'of God, even as the Last Judgment of the Western rose-window in Chartres melts into' heaven's own colour, blue.' St. Bernard of Clairvaux spoke of the dung heap of the flesh; Bernard Sylvestris saw in their strange union a discipline that made for greatness, and the body itself a not ignoble, hospice for the pilgrim soul. The spirit is richer for its limitations: this is the prison that makes men free. His Adam is the Summer of Chartres Cathedral, naked, fearless, and unbowed. . .." 1 This long quotation from a brilliant study of medieval humanities shows something of the complexity, the extremely variegated nature, the intensity, of this question of Mail in 1 Helen Waddell, The Wandering Scholars, pp. l!U, U!il. 136 MAN IN MEDIEVAL THOUGHT 187 the Middle Ages. It is all too easy to simplify the medieval man and turn him into a doll, either the evil leering marionette, or the immovable statue of a saint. The average modern opinion tends to regard all the ideas about man of that earlier age as corrupt and materialistic. A recent book by a Quaker author shows how the Holy Spirit was released by the Reformation . According to this view, man had been buried beneath an ecclesiastical system of centralised truth which prevented him from thinking for himself; it had utterly quenched the Spirit.2 He is taking for granted the authenticity of the picture painted by Coulton, Moorman and many other so-called historians of the Middle Ages. In that picture, great accuracy of detail with the more sombre and earthy colours had left a total impression that can have little connection with reality. Medieval man as seen from the registers of episcopal visitations and monastic prisons is a gross materialist, all body and nO' soul. His life is one of competition in a struggle to triumph over his neighbour, with the clergyman always most successful in filching money and land from the laity, and the chief clergyman , the Pope, the perfect forerunner of the soulless modern authoritarianism. To dip one's brush into the livelier, brighter colours is a temptation. In order to confound the overaccurate historian, we could depict a man of wisdom and culture, shining with the best traditions of ancient Greece and Rome blended with the spiritual glories of Augustine, Chrysostom, Gregory, and Cyril. Medieval hagiography would offer grounds for showing the men of that age to be more angels than men, dispensing iWith their bodies like St. Catherine unable to take food, developing their minds like St. Thomas whose body was large but almost ignored, or exhaling their souls in the tenderest but mightiest love, like St. Francis and St. Clare. We could tour the great medieval Cathedrals and admire the artist so preoccupied in the work of his hands that his name is forgotten and he is known only by what he had done, even as without grace God is known not by name but by His creation. We could sing with • G. F. Nuttall, The Holy...