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When all the sins of history are weighed in the balance, the virtues of these women will tip the scale against them, and redeem our race.
Mystics, therefore, appeared in every age, every religion, and every land.
As we read the mystics of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it dawns upon us that orthodoxy was often a barrier to contagious superstitions, and that in one aspect the Church was belief—as the state was force—organized from chaos into order to keep men sane.
“So I believe and so I hold, as doth every educated man. The vulgar hold otherwise. We must speak as the vulgar do, and think and believe with the few.”
Boniface had not realized, in undertaking so many conflicts, that the weapons of the papacy had been blunted by overuse.
Nowhere else in history has an organization wielded so profound an influence over so many men for so long a time.
The power of the Church, said the skeptical Hume, was a rampart of refuge against the tyranny and injustice of kings.
We shall find an unexpected freedom of thought among the philosophers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, even among professors at universities chartered and supervised by the Church. All that she asked was that such discussions should be confined and intelligible only to the educated, and should not take the form of revolutionary appeals to the people to abandon their creed or the Church.
She was, beyond question, the greatest civilizing force in medieval European history.
MAN in the jungle or hunting stage had to be greedy—to seek food eagerly and gorge himself zealously—because, when food came, he could not be sure when it would come again.
Vices were once virtues, indispensable to survival.
Ethically every civilization is a balance and tension between the jungle instincts of men and the inhibitions of a moral code.
Theologies and philosophies, like men and states, are what they are because in their time and place they have to be.
but moralists are bad historians.
hebdomadal
The heroes of several medieval sagas were bastards—Cuchulain, Arthur, Gawain, Roland, William the Conqueror, and many a knight in Froissart’s Chronicles.
St. Augustine had written: “If you do away with harlots the world will be convulsed with lust”;19 and St. Thomas Aquinas agreed.20
Engagement was an exchange of gages or pledges; the wedding itself was a pledge (Anglo-Saxon weddian, promise); the spouse was one who had re-sponded “I will.”
In rural villages such inbreeding was difficult to avoid, and the Church had to close her eyes to it, as to many another gap between reality and law.
To priests and theologians woman was still in these centuries what she had seemed to Chrysostom—“a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic peril, a deadly fascination, a painted ill.”
She had been “a bad wife, a bad mother, and a bad queen”;57 but who would think of her as belonging to a subject sex?
“All things obey money”;
in all ages law and morality have barely succeeded in maintaining social order against the innate individualism of men never intended by nature to be law-abiding citizens.
The barbarians did not at once cease to be barbarians when they became Christians.
Cleanliness was next to money, and varied with income;
Chess was prohibited by a council at Paris (1213) and by an edict of Louis IX (1254); no one paid much attention to these demurrers; the game became a consuming pastime among the aristocracy, and gave its name to the royal exchequer—a chequered table or chessboard on which the revenues of the state were reckoned.
The poor slept well on beds of straw, the rich slept poorly on perfumed pillows and feather mattresses.
In England and France all classes slept nude.
At Christmas time many towns and châteaux appointed a Lord of Misrule to organize pastimes and spectacles for the populace.
on January 14 a fête de l’âne, or Festival of the Ass: a pretty girl was placed on an ass, apparently to represent Mary on the Flight to Egypt; the ass was led into a church, was made to genuflect, was stationed beside the altar, and heard a Mass and hymns sung in its praise; and at the end both the priest and the congregation brayed thrice in honor of the animal that had saved the Mother of God from Herod, and borne Jesus into Jerusalem.
Our selection of instances in this chapter may have been unwittingly biased; at best they are fragmentary; statistics are lacking or unreliable; and history always leaves out the average man.
Perhaps hypocrisy, so indispensable to civilization, increased in the Middle Ages as compared with the frank secularism of antiquity, or the unabashed corporate brutality of our time.
Finally, it taught men that patriotism unchecked by a higher loyalty is a tool of mass greed and crime.
Just as the development of life requires variation as well as heredity, and the development of a society needs experimental innovation as well as stabilizing custom, so the development of art in Western Europe involved not only the continuity of a tradition in skills and forms, and the stimulation of Byzantine and Moslem examples, but also the repeated turning of the artist from the school to nature, from ideas to things, from the past to the present, from the imitation of models to the expression of self.
The joy of life conquered the fear of death in Gothic art.
But a monastery, however excellent as a school and refuge for the spirit, is condemned by its seclusion to be a repository of traditions rather than a theater of living experiment;
Those who cater to human vanity seldom starve.
Women have always received less credit in histories of art than they deserved. The adornment of the person and the home are precious elements in the art of life;
In several manuscripts one hesitates to decide which seems more beautiful—the decoration or the text. We paid a price for print.
We do injustice to art and artist alike when we separate one art too sharply from the rest, or the arts from the life of their time; reality is always more integrated than our chronicles; and the historian disintegrates for convenience’ sake the elements of a civilization whose components flowed as a united stream.
We must try not to sever the artist from the cultural complex that reared and taught him, gave him traditions and topics—praised or tormented him, used him up, buried him, and—more often than not—forgot his name.
great art is the child of a triumphant faith.
We know medieval sculpture only in its desolation.
We add misunderstanding to injury when we view its scattered members in museums. It was not meant to be seen in isolation; it was part of a theological theme and an architectural whole; and what might seem crude and ungainly in separation may have been skillfully suited to its context in stone.
We smile at such fiction, and return to our tales of sex and crime.
sowing, reaping, and vintage
The population was small, but it believed; it was poor, but it gave.
No definition of an architectural style has ever escaped exceptions; the works of man, like those of nature, resent generalizations, and flaunt their individuality in the face of every rule.
“These statues,” said Henry Adams, “are the Aeginetan marbles of French art.”21
History is a duel between art and time.
