From Judgment to Passion

Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200

Rachel Fulton Brown

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9780231500760
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Devotion to the crucified Christ is one of the most familiar, yet most disconcerting artifacts of medieval European civilization. How and why did the images of the dying God-man and his grieving mother achieve such prominence, inspiring unparalleled religious creativity as well such imitative extremes as celibacy and self-flagellation? To answer this question, Rachel Fulton ranges over developments in liturgical performance, private prayer, doctrine, and art. She considers the fear occasioned by the disappointed hopes of medieval Christians convinced that the apocalypse would come soon, the revulsion of medieval Jews at being baptized in the name of God born from a woman, the reform of the Church in light of a new European money economy, the eroticism of the Marian exegesis of the Song of Songs, and much more.
Devotion to the crucified Christ is one of the most familiar yet disconcerting artifacts of medieval European civilization. How and why did the images of the dying God-man and his grieving mother achieve such prominence, inspiring unparalleled religious creativity and emotional artistry even as they fostered such imitative extremes as celibacy, crusade, and self-flagellation?

Magisterial in style and comprehensive in scope, From Judgment to Passion is the first systematic attempt to explain the origins and initial development of European devotion to Christ in his suffering humanity and Mary in her compassionate grief. Rachel Fulton examines liturgical performance, doctrine, private prayer, scriptural exegesis, and art in order to illuminate and explain the powerful desire shared by medieval women and men to identify with the crucified Christ and his mother.

The book begins with the Carolingian campaign to convert the newly conquered pagan Saxons, in particular with the effort to explain for these new converts the mystery of the Eucharist, the miraculous presence of Christ's body at the Mass. Moving on to the early eleventh century, when Christ's failure to return on the millennium of his Passion (A.D. 1033) necessitated for believers a radical revision of Christian history, Fulton examines the novel liturgies and devotions that arose amid this apocalyptic disappointment. The book turns finally to the twelfth century when, in the wake of the capture of Jerusalem in the First Crusade, there occurred the full flowering of a new, more emotional sensibility of faith, epitomized by the eroticism of the Marian exegesis of the Song of Songs and by the artistic and architectural innovations we have come to think of as quintessentially high medieval.

In addition to its concern with explaining devotional change, From Judgment to Passion presses a second, crucial question: How is it possible for modern historians to understand not only the social and cultural functions but also the experience of faith—the impulsive engagement with the emotions, sometimes ineffable, of prayer and devotion? The answer, magnificently exemplified throughout this book's narrative, lies in imaginative empathy, the same incorporation of self into story that lay at the heart of the medieval effort to identify with Christ and Mary in their love and pain.

Part One

CHRISTUS PATIENS

CHAPTER ONE

History, Conversion, and the Saxon Christ

The Chieftain’s Son remained at the feast, and there, for His followers, the holy King of Heaven, the Ruler, made both wine and bread holy. He broke it with His hands, gave it to His followers and thanked God, expressing His gratitude to the One who created everything—the world and its happiness—and He spoke many a word (uuord). “Believe Me clearly,” He said, “that this is My body and also My blood. I here give both of them to you to eat and drink. This is what I will give and pour out on earth. With My body I will free you to come to God’s kingdom, to eternal life in heaven’s light. Always remember to continue to do what I am doing at this supper, tell the story of it to many men. This body and blood is a thing which possesses power (thit is mahtig thing): with it you will give honor to your Chieftain. It is a holy image (helag biliδi): keep it in order to remember Me, so that the sons of men will do it after you and preserve it in this world, and thus everyone all over this middle world will know what I am doing out of love to give honor to the Lord.”¹ —Anonymous (ninth century), Heliand

Corpus Christi, God made flesh in the bread and wine of the Eucharist, in the sacrament of the altar—this was the daily miracle that lay at the experiential, intellectual, and symbolic center of the late medieval devotion to Christ in his humanity and to his mother in her grief, the continuing and repeatable miracle of God’s physical, material, and, above all, historical presence in the very same flesh in which he had become incarnate from the womb of the Virgin.² This was the miracle assumed by Saint Francis of Assisi (d. 1226) in his insistence that his brothers should “show all possible reverence and honor to the most holy Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ,” and that the priests among them should do their work at the altar worthily, for “if the Blessed Virgin is so honored, as is becoming, because she carried Him in her most holy womb; if the Baptist trembled and did not dare to touch the holy head of God; if the tomb in which He lay for some time is held in veneration, how holy, just and fitting must be he who touches with his hands, receives in his heart and mouth, and offers to others to be received the One Who is not about to die but Who is to conquer and be glorified.”³ This was the miracle confirmed (or asserted) throughout the later Middle Ages in (stories of) visions of babies rent asunder in the hands of the priest, or of hosts found dripping with blood, or of patens filled not with bread, but with pieces of raw flesh.⁴ This was the miracle that caused devout women like Dorothy of Montau (d. 1394) to rush from church to church in order to “see” God held aloft in the hands of the priest at the moment of consecration as many as a hundred times in one day, the miracle that inspired Juliana of Mont Cornillon (c. 1193–1258) to campaign for the institution of a new feast dedicated to the celebration of the Eucharist and to the host consecrated therein.⁵ And this was the miracle contested repeatedly by heretics as various as Berengar of Tours (d. 1088), the Cathars of Cologne, Toulouse, and Montaillou, and John Wyclif (d. 1384) and the Lollards of late-fourteenth- and early-fifteenth-century England.⁶ Indeed, just as it was belief in this miracle that, from 1215, canonically defined the community of the faithful, “outside of which no one at all is saved,” so it was in challenging this belief (among others) that men and women like the late-medieval Cathars and Lollards came to be defined as heretics—that is, as no longer members of the community of the saved. For, asserted the first canon of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215),

[in] this church, Jesus Christ is himself both priest and sacrifice, and his body and blood are really (veraciter) contained in the sacrament of the altar under the species of bread and wine, the bread being transubstantiated into the body and the wine into the blood by the power of God, so that to carry out the mystery of unity we ourselves receive from Him the body He himself receives from us.⁷

And yet, for all its importance in the definition of the late-medieval community of Christendom, for all its centrality in the devotional life of late-medieval women like Dorothy and Juliana and men like Francis (and, in its negative valence, like Berengar and John Wyclif), for all that it was, in Miri Rubin’s apt paraphrase of Clifford Geertz’s words, “at the centre of the whole religious system of the later Middle Ages,” even in the thirteenth century with the promulgation of the canons of Lateran IV, this confidence—that Christ himself was present veraciter, “historically” or “substantially” in the bread and wine of the sacrament—was in point of fact relatively new.⁸ It was not, after all, a confidence that the early Christian Fathers shared, nor indeed was the manner of Christ’s presence in the eucharistic elements a question to which they felt it necessary to give any special attention, other than to affirm its sacred reality as the “body of the Lord.”⁹ To be sure, Ambrose of Milan (d. 397) and Augustine of Hippo (d. 430) both addressed the question, albeit somewhat obliquely (the former in a collection of addresses preached during the octave of Easter to the catechumens newly baptized on Easter day, the latter in two letters to the layman Januarius, in a handbook for the instruction of catechumens, and in his commentary on the Gospel of John). Nevertheless, for Ambrose, the operative question was not so much the historical reality of the creative transformation effected in the Eucharist per se, but rather the reality of the communicative experience of the sacrament effected in its present human participants: having been reborn through baptism, the catechumens shared in the eucharistic feast, and if asked how the bread that they brought to the altar became, or signified, the body of Christ, they might reassure themselves that “it is Christ’s own words that make the sacrament, the words by which all things were made: the heavens, the earth, the sea and all living creatures.… If the words of Christ have such power that things which did not exist should come into being, have they not the power that things which did exist shall continue in being and be changed into something else?”¹⁰ In contrast, for Augustine, the sacrament was arguably more symbol than ritual (although neither exclusively), its effect not only to bind the communicants together in charity but also to provoke an act of remembering: for the catechumen properly educated in biblical history, the physical elements of the sacrament, like the written words of Scripture, could be read as signs or figures inviting the reader to interpretation and thereby to an understanding of the sacred rite as a commemoration of past deeds, themselves recognizable through interpretation as acts of God’s love. In this way the communicant would recognize himself or herself as redeemed in the story of the God-man.¹¹ Neither of these Fathers was particularly concerned, however, to establish an exact causal identity between the consecrated bread and wine and the historical body and blood.

In fact, it was only in the ninth century—following the forcible conversion of the Saxons and Avars by the Franks and the contemporary efforts to reform, Romanize, and standardize the Gallican liturgy in accordance with the educational program set out by Charlemagne in his Admonitio generalis of 789—that the nature of the Eucharist—specifically, of the change effected through the consecration of the bread and wine, and thus of the relationship between the sacramental and the historical body and blood of the Savior—would itself become a matter for concentrated theological exposition, most famously at the great royal abbey of Corbie.¹² There were a number of reasons for this new emphasis. On the one hand, the Carolingian project of standardization provoked a new consciousness not only of the liturgy as ritual but also of the discrepancies within the interpretive tradition, particularly among the descriptions provided by the Fathers such as Ambrose and Augustine—discrepancies that it now became incumbent upon the theologians to resolve.¹³ On the other hand, the project of education, including the education of the laity, enjoined upon the clergy an ideal not only of Christian unity but also of comprehension: it was not enough, the Frankish bishops insisted, for the people simply to participate in the rituals of the universal Church; they must also understand them.¹⁴ This process of instruction, a daunting task (as Augustine himself had realized) even at the best of times, was even further complicated in the ninth century by the influx of (at times, involuntary) new converts to the Church from paganism, converts for whom not only the ideal of Christian unity but, indeed, the very fundamentals of the Christian faith—that the world itself was a creature of God, that that same God had become incarnate in human history, that history was a working out of God’s love for humanity, that (as Augustine had understood it) to be saved was to recognize oneself as a participant in this history—were quite simply nonsense, descriptions of a reality that was, in their view, no-reality. From this perspective, differences, for example, between the “Gallican” or “Ambrosian” language of sacramental change and the “Roman” or “Augustinian” language of symbolic presence (in Joseph Geiselmann’s formulation of the question) were, if not, in fact, irrelevant, then at the very least much less pressing than they would appear to those working from within the Christian tradition itself.

Not coincidentally, this problem of instructing the newly baptized pagans in the fundamentals of Christian ritual and history was of particular concern to the monks at Corbie, where, under Charlemagne’s cousin Adalhard (abbot 780–815), a number of Saxon warriors had been resettled as a part of the emperor’s pacification program.¹⁵ In 822 one of these monks, Paschasius Radbertus (c. 790–865), assisted Adalhard in confirming the foundation of a daughterhouse, Corvey (Corbeia Nova), in central Saxony near Paderborn, and in 833 Warin, a former student of Paschasius, was appointed abbot there.¹⁶ Significantly, prior to his appointment as abbot, Warin had served as the magister monasticae disciplinae at Corvey, and he was also part Saxon himself. It is not surprising, therefore, that he was especially sensitive to the difficulties involved in explaining the new rituals to his Saxon novices, and in 831 he had asked his old teacher for assistance.¹⁷ In response, Paschasius wrote the work that was to set the terms for all subsequent discussion of the Eucharist in the Middle Ages—insofar, that is, as it asserted (or denied) the “real” presence of the historical, terrestrial, risen, and now glorified body of Christ in the consecrated elements of the bread and wine. And indeed, it is for this reason, if for no other, that it is worth our attention here, at the outset of a history of the devotion to the humanity of Christ and his mother’s compassion: it was through Paschasius and the contemporary concern to convert the Saxons to the history upon which the miracle of the liturgy depended that the intellectual and experiential stakes in this devotion would first become clear.

Although couched in the abstract patristic vocabulary of figure and sacrament, Paschasius’s argument in his De corpore et sanguine Domini is unambiguously physical, or material: after the consecration, the bread and wine are truly (in veritate) the historical body and blood of Christ. A decade or so later (in 843 or 844), when Paschasius, newly abbot of Corbie, presented a revised copy of his work to the emperor Charles the Bald (840–877) as a Christmas present, this argument seems to have created something of a stir at court, and Charles in turn sent a request to Corbie for clarification.¹⁸ He asked two questions: whether the Eucharist presented the body and blood in mysterio… an in veritate, and whether that body was the body “born of Mary, that suffered, died and was buried, and that rising again ascended into heaven and sits on the right hand of the Father.”¹⁹ The answer that Charles requested came not from Paschasius but from Ratramnus (d. c. 875), one of the younger monks at Corbie, who in his response to the emperor affected a greater degree of theological subtlety than that which his abbot had used in writing to the Saxon novices ten years earlier. Ratramnus affirmed that the bread and wine received in the mouths of the faithful were truly the body and blood, but invisibly, not visibly: “As visible created objects they feed the body, but in virtue of their more powerful status they feed and sanctify the minds of the faithful.”²⁰ Paschasius, stung by the intellectual challenge presented by this upstart theoretician, forcefully reaffirmed his position a few years later in an open letter to another former student of his, Fredugard, who had read both books and was, as Gary Macy says, “understandably quite confused.”²¹ Paschasius assured him: “No one who is sane believes that Jesus had any other flesh and blood than that which was born of the Virgin Mary and suffered on the Cross. And it is that very same flesh (ipsa namque eademque caro), in whatever manner (quocumque modo), that should be understood, I believe, when he says: ‘This is my body that is given for many,’ and ‘This is my blood.’”²²

The traditional interpretation of this theological exchange is one of controversy, two monks battling openly for the favor of the king, one asserting the “real presence,” and the other insisting on a proto-Protestant denial of substantial change, but for some time now such a reading of the discussion has generally been considered oversimplistic (not to mention anachronistic).²³ Both Paschasius and Ratramnus argued that the bread and wine were truly the body and blood, but they differed on the manner in which the sacramental elements should be understood as a figure (figura) and on the nature of the truth (veritas) to which they provided access. Ratramnus argued that it was necessary to distinguish between the truth accessible to the bodily senses and the truth accessible to the understanding: in that the bread and wine remained sensibly bread and wine, they could not be the historical body and blood of Christ in veritate, otherwise the bread and wine would be perceived by the senses as bones, nerves, and muscles; rather, the bread and wine provided access to the true body of Christ in figura, the sensed reality acting as a veil for the spiritual reality that it signified.²⁴ In contrast, Paschasius argued for an identity between the sensible figure and the thing signified, “since the thing of which it is a figure is true” (ut sit res uera cuius figura est).²⁵ After the consecration, the body and blood still appeared to the senses “in the figure of bread and wine,” but in that figure “there is nothing at all but the flesh and blood of Christ.”²⁶

To explain how this might be, Paschasius appealed on the one hand to God’s creative power (God’s spoken word), and on the other to biblical history (God’s written word). According to Paschasius, the bread and wine are a “sacrament of faith,” both a truth (veritas) and a figure (figura): “a truth, because the body and blood of Christ are made from the substance of bread and wine by the spiritual power of the word; and a figure, because the lamb is sacrificed daily on the altar by the priest in memory of the sacred passion.”²⁷ As a figure, the Eucharist was, therefore, akin to the events and persons in the Old Testament, themselves read by biblical exegetes for centuries as shadows or foreshadowings of events and persons in the New. Where Paschasius differed from his contemporaries, however, was in his emphasis on the literal, historical reality of these Old Testament figures.²⁸ The Paschal lamb,...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• List of Plates
• Acknowledgments
• A Note to the Reader
• Epigraph
• Introduction
• Part 1: Christus Patiens
• Part 2: Maria Compatiens
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of Scriptural Citations
• Index of Manuscripts Cited
• General Index