Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Peter Brown
Read between
January 10 - January 11, 2019
ancient models of aristocratic role reversal.
they had broken pointedly with the values and lifestyle of the aristocracy while maintaining the prestige, the poise, and the authoritative tone of voice of the class that they had abandoned.
an “out class,”
The aristocrat-turned-monk carried with him (almost as a second halo) the memory of the wealth and status of his profane past.
As a result, the bishops of Gaul increasingly looked to the saints as the sources of their authority. Memories of Roman birth were no longer enough.
the representative of a saint who was more alive in his tomb than he had ever been when on earth.
He was a churchman and a devotee of Saint Martin first, and a descendent of senators seco...
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a lordship based on the other world.
as members of a progressively homogenized ruling class.
It did not come from his senatorial background, and still less did it come from flamboyant gestures of ascetic renunciation. Rather, it was the quiet presence beside him of “his” lord, Saint Martin, that gave Gregory his authority.
Secondly, Gregory saw the justice of God at its most forceful when it acted in defense of the poor.
To oppress the poor was to do no less than trample upon Christ.
the wealth of the church was regarded as wealth held in trust for the poor.
served to sacralize ecclesiastical property.
Any attack on the lands of the church was an attack on the poor.
For it was from the estates of the church that the poor were supposed to be fed.
“murderers of the poor.”
gifts for the soul continued to be seen to operate through the poor.
through the provision of food, clothing, and shelter to the destitute.
It is difficult to measure the amount of wealth that went directly, through the church, to the care of the poor in Merovingian Gaul. What we can know, however, is the symbolic role that the poor played in Gregory’s imaginative world.
The failures of nature and the laments of the poor came together in his mind.
not only private benefits bestowed by the saints on individuals but public portents that proclaimed the restoration of peace and concord in society at large.
miracles were metaphors of order and deliverance come true.
tears showed that the hardened will itself had melted.
In his imagination, the material world flowed easily into the other world.
Miracles had a public dimension.
living metaphors for the restoration of social order.
freedom from chains in this world echoed the vast release of freedom from the chains of sin in the next.
at the tombs of saints in crowded shrines,
We no longer follow Gregory’s intent gaze as he recorded the stunning intrusions of the other world at shrines filled with swarms of worshippers. Rather, we follow the repercussions of a fierce quest for sanctity among the very few in the deep, notional quiet of great new monasteries and convents.
The other world was thought to step, for an instant, into this world at the deathbeds of the saints, not at their blazing, fully public tombs.
The Christianity of Gaul was already an old religion.
the spread of Columbanian monasticism ensured that, in the rich earth of Christian Gaul, yet another layer of soil came to the surface, adding a new and vivid streak of color to ancient fields.
the worldview of the great writers and preachers of southern Gaul of the fifth century, with which we began Chapter 4, lingered in the libraries of distant Ireland.
Such a challenge did not necessarily endear Columbanus to the Gallic bishops, who considered that they themselves had a monopoly over the right to warn their congregations of the approach of the Last Judgment.
For Columbanus, God was surrounded by deep silence.
Yet this hidden God could be glimpsed in part by the pure of heart.
Human beings were tragically weak, but they had, at least, the remnant of a healthy will with which to wrestle with the horrendous, sinful, other will that had attached itself to them like “an insatiable and rabid leech.”15 They were free to fight back. They did so by opting for a regime of shared suffering that pushed its participants to the breaking point.
the life of a monk was a life of total surrender:
It is, indeed, the “the toughness of his converts,” and not Columbanus himself, who present the greatest mystery to the historian.
The abandonment of personal freedom and unflinching obedience to a superior were the essence of the monastic life, for they were the only way to light the inner fire of the love of God.
the hard way toward building a heaven on earth.
could be achieved only through pulverizing the hard, class-bound wills of the monks and nuns.
the Irish and British practice of regular confession,
In the long run, this led to an “epoch-making acceptance” in Gaul of a new religious practice developed in what had hitherto been a marginal Christian region.
In Ireland and elsewhere, regular confession was a form of “elective piety.”21 It was never imposed on the church at large, as would happen in the High Middle Ages and in modern Catholicism.
an elite practice,
Three times a day, in many convents, every nun would confess her sins of thought and action. She would receive absolution and a measured penance from the mouth of one of her fellows.
It was a system that brought the gift of quick closure and the ease of a “purified” heart to an environment where monks and nuns were stretched to their limits in all other matters.
rebellions and breakouts in Columbanian monasteries and convents.
