Blessing the World: Ritual and Lay Piety in Medieval Religion

Conclusion

269 ConClusion The tradition of Christian blessing was a rich, complex, and pervasive component of the culture and religion of the medieval West. From its origin in ancient Israel, blessing spread to all parts of Latin Christendom through the agency of the Roman liturgy of late antiquity, developing both within and apart from the Mass.Blessing was further developed and elaborated in the early Middle Ages through the Roman Catholic Church’s contact with Germanic peoples,who enthusiastically adopted ritual blessing as they adapted it to meet local ritual needs.This Franco-Roman tradition was first fully realized in the tenth-century Romano-Germanic pontifical, upon which the later pontificals and benedictionals of the high and late Middle Ages built.Careful analysis of these rituals can tell the historian much about medieval people’s understanding of ritual, the sacred, and the divine power to which blessings appealed. Blessings also show us how medieval Christians ,both lay and clerical,conceived of their cosmos and their relationship to the powers of their cosmology. Let us conclude with a summary of the medieval conceptions of the sacred and divine as seen in blessings as a window into medieval cosmology, and examine the blessings’ relationship to the piety of the age. the natuRe of the sacRed in the Middle ages The nature of the sacred is a subject that every culture addresses in some form or other.The culture of the medieval Latin West is no exception.There are many commonalities between our age’s understanding of the sacred and divine and the medieval understanding. God’s qualities of omnipotence, omniscience, goodness, mercy, wrath, and justice are familiar to medieval and modern pulpits alike.But the ritual blessings of the Latin church offer a z 270 ConClusion much richer picture of the divine than these absolutes alone.Blessings portray God as a force characterized above all by his adaptability and utility.As a farmer in agricultural blessings, a purifier in reconciliations of violated cemeteries,a militant defender in blessings of knights,a doctor in blessings against illness,and a just judge in ordeal blessings,God was nothing if not versatile. The divine manifested whatever “face” was necessary to meet the needs and expectations of the individual and the community. God is in fact so adaptable in these blessings that one wonders if his chameleonlike nature is simply a function of his omnipotence. While this notion has some merit, it ignores subtleties in this adaptive process that present a more complex image of God. The presence of distinct personae of God within the blessings raises the question why such elements would be included in a ritual if there was universal acceptance of God as an abstract omnipotence. In that case, why not simply declare God omnipotent and move on to the request of the blessing? I believe the answer is that the medieval conception of God was much too rich and nuanced for such familiar abstractions to be sufficient.Not only is God described in many different terms and roles in the blessings,but he is often cast in contrary ways within a single blessing:the God who demands service to selfless ideals of knighthood also bestows personal glory and worldly renown; the God who heals communities of sin punishes individual sinners; the God who mercifully protects the faithful from harm mercilessly annihilates the unfaithful. The divine was thought able to change his nature at will,and the blessings suggest that medieval people were more concerned about how and when God’s power manifested itself than about the scope of that power as a theological principle. The second notable trait of divinity in blessings is its ambivalence and ambiguity. This trait is implicit in the constant qualification and contextualization of God that we see in pilgrim blessings that stress God’s guidance and salvation of the wandering Tobias, or when God was made to recall his assistance to the Israelites in crossing the Red Sea,or in the blessing of a cemetery, when the celebrant implores God’s intervention: “just as you blessed the earth of the graves through the hand of the first fathers,namely Abraham,Isaac,andJacob.”1Whywouldthisprocessof contextualizationbe necessary if God’s presence and action were assured? It could be that these 1.RP12th 287 (ordo 52b.12). 271 ConClusion allusions and exhortations were included as a way to honor God for his past deeds,but I believe this is...