Adolf Harnack · 3 of 17

1. The Fresh Rise of Piety.

1. The Fresh Rise of Piety.

The Monastery of Clugny, founded in the tenth century, became the centre of the great reform which the Church in the West passed through in the eleventh century. Instituted by monks, it was at first supported against the secularised monachism, priesthood (Episcopate), and papacy by pious and prudent princes and bishops, above all, by the Emperor, the representative of God on earth, until the great Hildebrand laid hold of it, and, as Cardinal and successor of Peter, set it in opposition to the princes, the secularised clergy, and the Emperor. What the West obtained in it was a monastic reform of the Church, that rested on the idea of a view of the world that made everything alike, and that consequently favoured the universal supremacy of Rome over the Church. What were the aims of this new movement which took hold of the entire Church in the second half of the eleventh century? In the first instance, and chiefly, the restoration in the monasteries themselves of the “old” discipline, of the true abnegation of the world, and piety; but then, also, first, the monastic training of the whole secular clergy, second, the supremacy of the monastically trained clergy over the lay world, over princes and nations; third, the reduction of national churches, with their pride and secularity, in favour of the uniform supremacy of Rome.

The attempt to control the life of the whole clergy by monastic rules had already begun in the Carlovingian period; but in part it had failed, in part the Chapters had only become thoroughly secularised. Now, however, it was undertaken anew and with greater efficiency. In the Cluniacensian reform Western monachism raised for the first time the decided claim to apply, and find recognition for, itself as the Christian order of life for all Christians of full age — the priests. This Western monachism could not withdraw from the. task of serving the Church and urging itself upon it, i.e., upon the clergy of the day, as Christianity. The Christian freedom which it strove for was for it, with all wavering, not only a freedom from the world, but the freedom of Christendom for unrestricted preparation for the life beyond, and for the service of God in this world. But no man can serve two masters.

Herewith there was given also its relation to the laity, with the position of the latter. If the mature confessors of Christianity must be trained according to monastic rules, then the immature — and these are the laity — must leave an entirely free course to the former, and must at least pay respect to their majesty, that it may be possible to stand approved in the coming judgment. If Clugny and its great Popes required the strict observance of celibacy, the estrangement of the priests from secular life, and especially the extirpation of all “simony,” then this last demand of itself involved, under the then existing distribution of power and property, the subjection of the laity, inclusive of the civil power, to the Church. But what was the Church’s dominion over the world to mean, side by side with the renunciation of the world exacted of all priests? How does that power over the earth harmonise with exclusive concern for the soul’s salvation in the world beyond? How can the same man who exclaims to his brother who thinks of leaving him all the patrimonial property, “What an unjust division, — for thee, heaven, and for me, the earth,” and who then himself enters a monastery — how can this same man bring himself to contend from within the monastery for dominion over the world? Now in a certain sense this dominion is something substitutionary, so long as and because the true, universal Christianising has not been carried out. As long as all are not genuine Christians, the obstinate world and the half-developed Christendom must be governed and educated, for otherwise the gospel would be captured by the powers hostile to it, and would not be in the position to fulfil its mission. But the dominion is certainly not merely something substitutionary. Christianity is asceticism and the City of God. All earthly relations must be moulded by the transcendent and universal idea of God’s kingdom, and all national political forms of life must be brought under control in accordance therewith. But the kingdom of God has its existence on this side of things in the Church. The States, therefore, must become subject to the divine ends of the Church; they must merge themselves in the kingdom of righteousness and of the victorious Christ, which is a truly heavenly kingdom, because it has its source in heaven, and is ruled by Christ’s representative. Thus out of the programme of renunciation of the world and out of the supra-mundane world that was to permeate this world, out of the Augustinian idea of the city of God and out of the idea of the one Roman world-empire, an idea that had never disappeared, but that had reached its glorification in the papal supremacy, there developed itself the claim to world-dominion, though the ruin of many an individual monk might be involved in making it. With sullied consciences and broken courage many monks, whose only desire was to seek after God, yielded to the plans of the great monastic Popes, and became subservient to their aims. And those whom they summoned from the retirement of the cloisters were just those who wished to think least of the world. They knew very well that it was only the monk who fled from the world, and would be rid of it, that could give help in subduing the world. Abandonment of the world in the service of the world-ruling Church, dominion over the world in the service of renunciation of the world, — this was the problem, and the ideal of the Middle Ages! What an innocent simplicity, what a wealth of illusions, was involved in believing that this ideal could be realised, and in working for it! What a childlike reverence for the Church was necessary for developing that paradoxical flight from the world,” which at one and the same moment could join the fight and pray, utter cursing and blessing, exercise dominion and do penance! What a spirit of romance filled those souls, which at a single view could see in nature and all sensuous life an enchantment of the devil, and could behold in it at the same time, as illumined by the Church, the reflection of the world beyond What kind of men were they, who abandoned the world and gladsome life, and then took back from the hand of the Church the good things of earth, love-making, combat and victory, speculating and money-making, feasting, and the joys of sense! Of course, with a slight turn of the kaleidoscope, all these things were in ruins; there must be fasting and repentance; but again a slight turn, and everything was back again which the world could afford — but glorified with the light of the Church and of the world beyond.

At the close of this period (about 1200) the Church was victorious. If ever ideals were carried out in the world and gained dominion over souls it happened then. “It was as if the world had cast aside its old garment and clothed itself in the white robe of the Church.” Negation of the world and rule of the world by the Church appeared to men identical. That age bore in its culture “the pained look of world-renunciation on the one hand, and the look of strong character suggesting world-conquest on the other.” But in the period we are reviewing the development, which had to cancel itself when it seemed to have come near its completion, was still in process. Much was still to be done in the way of excavating secularised Christendom from its rough surroundings. And the masses were really changed in temper and set on fire — set on fire to contend against

the secularised clergy and against simonistic princes in the whole of Europe. A new enthusiasm of a religious kind stirred the nations of the West, especially the Romanic. The ardour of the Crusades was the direct fruit of the monastic papal reform movement of the eleventh century. In them most vividly the religious revival which had passed over the West revealed itself in its specific character. The supremacy of the Church must be given effect to on earth. It was the ideas of the world-ruling monk of Clugny that guided the Crusaders on their path. The Holy Land and Jerusalem were parts of heaven on earth. They must be conquered. The dreadful and affecting scenes at the taking of the sacred city illustrate the spirit of mediæval piety.

Christianity is ascetism and the City of God — but the Church, which really fired souls for these ideas, lit also thereby the flame of religious individualism; it awakened the power which was ultimately strong enough to burst through the strict bonds of system and sever the chain. But it was long before things went so far as this. The Cluniacensian reform, if I see aright, produced as yet no religious individualism at all, in the sense of manifold expressions of piety. The enthusiastic religious spirit of the eleventh century was quite of the same kind in individual cases. Among the numerous founders of orders during this period, there still prevailed the greatest uniformity: spiritual need, flight from the world, contemplation — all of them are expressed in similar forms and by the same means. An appeal must not be made to the Sectaries, already numerous in this century; they stood in scarcely any connection with the ecclesiastical revival, and had as yet no influence upon it.

Through the Crusades this became changed. The primitive Christian intuitions were restored. The sacred places stirred the imagination, and led it to the Christ of the Gospels. Piety was quickened by the most vivid view of the suffering and dying Redeemer; He must be followed through all the stages of His path of sorrow! Negative asceticism thus obtained a positive form, and a new and more certain aim. The notes of the Christ-Mysticism, which Augustine had struck only singly and with uncertainty, became a ravishing melody. Beside the sacramental Christ the image of the historical took its place — majesty in humility, innocence in penal suffering, life in death. That dialectic of piety without dialectic, that combined spectacle of suffering and of glory, that living picture of the true communicatio idiomatum (communication of attributes) developed itself, before which mankind stood worshipping, adoring with equal reverence the sublimity and the abasement. The sensuous and the spiritual, the earthly and the heavenly, shame and honour, renunciation and fulness of life were no longer tumultuously intermingled: they were united in serene majesty in the “Ecce homo.” And so this piety broke forth into the solemn hymn: “Salve caput cruentatum” (“O Lamb of God once wounded”). We cannot measure the effects which this newly-tempered piety produced, nor can we calculate the manifold types it assumed, and the multitude of images it drew within its range. We need only recall the picture — new, and certainly only derived from the cross — of the mother and child, the God in the cradle, omnipotence in weakness. Where this piety appears without dogmatic formule, without fancifulness, without subtlety, or studied calculation, it is the simple expression, now brought back again, of the Christian religion itself; for in reverence for the suffering Christ, and in the power which proceeds from His image, all the forces of religion are embraced. But even where it does not appear in its purity, where there is intermingled with it the trivial — down even to the heart-of-Jesus-worship — the over-refined and studied, it can still be salutary and worthy of honour, more salutary and worthy of honour, at least, than the strivings of a purely negative asceticism governed by no living conception. Even, indeed, where it manifestly degenerates into paganism, there will still remain some remnant of that liberating message, that the divine is to be found in humility and in patient suffering, and that the innocent suffers that the guilty may have peace.

In the period under review, this newly attuned piety, born of the Crusades, and nurtured on Augustine as now understood, was still in process of growth. But we have already alluded to the man who stood at the beginning, though he was himself no initiator, Saint Bernard. Bernard is the religious genius of the twelfth century, and therefore also the leading spirit of the age. Above all, in him the Augustinian contemplation was revived. Too much is not asserted when it is said that he was Augustinus redivivus, that he moulded himself entirely on the pattern of the great African, and that from him what lay at the foundation of his pious contemplations was derived. So far as Bernard furnishes a system of contemplation, and describes the development of love, on to its fourth and highest stage, at which man, rising above self-love, is wholly absorbed in the love of God, and experiences that momentary ecstasy in which he becomes one with God — so far Bernard has simply experienced anew what Augustine experienced before him. Even his language indeed is to a very large extent dependent on the language of the Confessions. But Bernard has also learned his relation to Jesus Christ from the great leader. Like the latter he writes: “Dry is all food of the soul if it is not sprinkled with the oil of Christ. When thou writest, promise me nothing, unless I read Jesus in it. When thou conversest with me on religious themes, promise me nothing if I hear not Jesus’ voice. Jesus — honey to the taste, melody to the ear, gladness to the soul.” But here Bernard has taken a step beyond Augustine. “Reverence for what is beneath us” dawned upon him, as it had never dawned upon any Christian of the older world (not even upon Augustine); for these earlier Christians, while revering asceticism as the means of escape from the body, still, as men of the ancient world, were unable to see in suffering and shame, in the cross and death, the form of the divine. The study of the Song of Songs (under the direction of Ambrose), and the spirit enkindled by the Crusades, led him before the image of the crucified Saviour as the bridegoom of the soul. In this picture he became absorbed. From the features of the suffering Christ there shone forth upon him truth and love. In a literal sense He hangs on His lips and gazes on His limbs: “My beloved, saith the Spouse, is white and ruddy: in this we see both the white light of truth and the ruddy glow of love” (in hoc nobis et candet veritas et rubet caritas), says Gilbert in the spirit of Bernard. The basis for this Christ-contemplation — the wounds of Christ as the clearest token of His love — was laid by Ambrose and Augustine (Christ, mediator as man), and the image of the soul’s bridegroom goes back to Origen and Valentinus (cf. also Ignatius); but Bernard was the first to give to the pious spirit its historic Christian intuitions; he united the Neoplatonic self-discipline for rising to God with contemplation of the suffering and dying Redeemer, and released the subjectivity of the Christ-Mysticism and the Christ-Lyricism.

But in spite of all quickening of the imagination, and in spite of his most ardent devotion to the person of Christ, even Bernard was obliged to pay the heavy tribute that is exacted of every mystic, — the mood of abandonment after the blessed feeling of union, and the exchange of the historic Christ for the dissolving picture of the ideal. With him the latter is specially remarkable. It might have been expected that for one who became so absorbed in the picture of the suffering Christ, it would have been impossible to repeat the direction given by Origen and Augustine, that we must rise from the word of scripture, and from the Incarnate Word, to the “Spirit.” And yet this final and most questionable direction of mysticism, which nullifies historical Christianity and leads on to pantheism, was most distinctly repeated by Bernard. No doubt what he has written in ep. 106, on the uselessness of the study of Scripture, as compared with practical devotion to Christ, may still be interpreted in the light of the thought, that Christianity must be experienced, not known. But there is no ambiguity in the ex-positions in the twentieth sermon on the Song of Songs. Here the love to Christ that is stirred by what Christ did or offered in the flesh is described as still to some extent fleshly. It is no doubt a valuable circumstance that Bernard does not regard the distress and anguish awakened by the picture of the man Jesus as the highest thing, that he rather sees in it a portion of the fleshly love. But he then goes on to say, that in true spiritual love we must rise altogether from the picture of the historic Christ to the Christ κατὰ πνεῦμα (after the spirit), and for this he appeals to John VI. and 2 Cor. V. 16. All the mysticism of after times retained this feature. It learned from Bernard the Christ-contemplation; but, at the same time, it adopted the pantheistic tendency of the Neoplatonists and Augustine. In the second half of the twelfth century the new piety was already a powerful force in the Church. The subjectivity of pious feeling was unfettered in the monasteries. But as the same man who, in the seclusion of his monastery, spoke a new language of adoration, preached flight from the world, and called to the Pope that he sat in Peter’s chair to serve and not to rule — as this man at the same time continued fettered by all the hierarchical prejudices of his age, and himself guided the policy of the world-ruling Church, even the pious in the Church in the twelfth century had not yet felt the contrast between Church and Christianity. The attachment of monachism to the Church was still of a naive kind; the contradiction between the actual form of the world-ruling Church and the gospel which it preached was felt, indeed, but always suppressed again. That great mendicant monk had not yet come on the scene whose appearing was to work the crisis in the fluctuating struggle between renunciation of the world and lordship over it. But already the Church was beset all around by the wrathful curses of the “heretics,” who saw in the Church’s powerful exercise of her dominion and in the alienation of her gifts of grace the features of the ancient Babylon.