Because I spent far too long in school, my head is full of lots of odd stories about how Christians have worshiped through the ages. This one is particularly unusual and, I think, fascinating, as it was one of the important but pretty well forgotten causes of the Reformation. –Bill Doggett
The Middle Ages were a time of tremendous change and social upheaval. The so-called Dark Ages, in which the political structures of the Roman Empire failed, and much of Europe became isolated, lawless and impoverished, had begun, by the Eighth Century, to be replaced by relative prosperity. It was, to be sure, only relative – the Holy Roman Empire, inaugurated at the beginning of the Ninth Century with the crowning of Charlemagne on Christmas Day, 800 as Emperor, began to make roads safe for trade, and also began an alliance between church and state which represented a new understanding of the nature of political power. In this new order, the church nominally controlled political leaders, whose authority was divinely conferred, but mediated by the church.
Cities and regions, which had been isolated politically, began to see themselves as part of larger areas once again, and those larger regions became defined by language, as the Latin of the Roman Empire degenerated into French, Spanish, Romanian, Portuguese, and the various Italian dialects even as the Germanic-speaking kingdoms of the north gain prominence in the new political world of the West.
Monastery schools begin to become centers of learning to which men gravitate, since the new peace and prosperity allow both the time for study and the safety for travel.
Progress was not steady – wars, epidemics, and the plague periodically devastated large regions and sent them back to the conditions of the previous centuries, but although erratic, change was ongoing. The cross-fertilization of ideas without the imposed uniformity of the old Roman Empire brought about great advances in scholarship, science, music and poetry.
The Crusades, as misguided as they were, brought Western Europeans into contact with the cultures of Eastern Christendom and the Muslim world, which had preserved much of the literature of classical antiquity which had been lost in the West. Aristotle, Pythagoras and Plato were read again in the West, and Arabic Arithmetic and Algebra changed Western Science and Arabic instruments like trumpets and kettledrums transformed Western music.
We are accustomed to thinking of the Middle Ages as a time of superstition, when the earth was flat and at the center of the universe, and the poor benighted people engaged in bizarre and outlandish rituals grown out of their inability to distinguish between fact and fancy.
I would like to tell you a different story about the Middle Ages.
C.S. Lewis, in his book, The Discarded Image, points out that the medievals were the opposite of superstitious. They were, although largely illiterate, an incredibly bookish people. Truth, in the Middle Ages, rested entirely on authority, and that meant it rested on books. A thing was considered to be true if an authority could be cited, and the elaborate arguments of the Middle Ages that seem so extraordinarily convoluted and abstruse to us come out of the medieval need to reconcile authorities who seem to disagree.
It may seem bizarre to us to go to such convolutions to prove that two authors who disagree can both be right, instead of letting one refute the other, but in the context of the medieval world view, it made perfect sense.
And the medieval world-view, as Lewis elaborates it, is a thing of extraordinary beauty. Medieval cosmology was not just an explanation of observable phenomena, as ours is today (or at least as we believe it to be – none of us has ever seen an atom or a black hole) but an elegant construction which showed the parts of creation to be in harmony with one another and in harmony with divine purpose. It was truly beautiful, and it’s no wonder that people gave it up with such difficulty.
The medieval cosmos was a universe of solemn order – the ball of the earth (the flat earth is an 18th century slur on the medievals, who knew the earth to be spherical) hung from heaven on a golden chain, and around it hung the spheres of the planets and the fixed stars in an atmosphere of divine ether, populated by the longaevi: the angels; and surrounded by the great sphere of the primum mobile, invisible but moving all things, itself set into harmonious and musical motion by the all-encompassing love of God. Divine purpose similarly inspired human institutions, and when one stood in church, in a place which represented one’s place in society, with the priest at the altar mediating God’s grace and the building and its decoration representing in visible form the perfection of the divine order, it must have been comforting indeed, and glorious, to know in such a palpable way that one had a place in the divine economy.
One way, perhaps, to understand the comfort of that worldview, and the consequences of its loss, is to consider that when the medievals looked up into the sky, they saw not the vast emptiness of space, but the safe and enclosing dome of the sky, harboring angels and God, and ringing with the “music of the spheres.” The comforting closeness of the universe was shattered utterly in 1572, when Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe observed a “Stella Nova” – a new star, and the idea of “outer space” was born. Fifty years later, Blaise Pascal would write in his journal, “Le silence eternelle d’espaces infinie m’effraie” (The eternal silence of infinite space terrifies me) The medievals could not have prayed for “the vast expanse of interstellar space,” or “this fragile earth, our island home,” for to them the heavens were near, and the earth was sturdy and central.
In that cozy and well-ordered universe, Christians participated in a complex and fascinating spiritual life, which included a number of rituals which enacted and regularized the relationship between God, the people, and social institutions.
We are looking at one of those devotions, the one that gets the most bad press when we talk about medieval liturgy, that is the strong medieval desire to look at the consecrated host.
The story that is handed down to us by the religious reformers of the 15th and 16th centuries is that the hierarchy of the Western church so privatized the mass for the clergy that the people, deprived of any other form of participation in the Eucharist, as they had nothing to say, nothing to hear, and no longer received communion more than once a year, began to participate in the only way they could, and elevated seeing to an exaggeratedly high place in their devotional life.
This is a nearly plausible story, and it certainly suited the polemical aims of the reformers to tell it. It is even partially true.
Nathan Mitchell, in Cult and Controversy: The Worship of the Eucharist Outside Mass points out that our primary ways of understanding God, just like our primary ways of understanding our self, are through seeing and hearing. At the most basic level, the first transaction of self-actualization in infancy is seeing and being seen, and the second is naming and being named. Seeing and naming are fundamental to human experience of self and the world, and they are fundamental to human experience of God as well. The face of God, seeing us and being glimpsed through the veil, the name of God, unutterable yet revealing and the Word of God, naming us as God’s beloved children – these are the ways we know God and know ourselves through God.
Mitchell’s point is that powerful visual devotions are integral to human worship, and while the form of medieval piety was shaped by the time and the excesses and perversities of medieval liturgy, the impulse for a visual devotion to God is not only natural but vital, and would have expressed itself in some form no matter how the medieval Eucharist had been celebrated.
What, then, was this much maligned medieval practice?
The medievals were extraordinarily devoted to looking at the communion wafer at the moment of consecration. There are numerous accounts of people shouting at the priest to hold it higher, and for longer. Some churches had an elaborate set-up with a curtain on pulleys that would be raised behind the priest at the moment of elevation to make the host more visible. Often this curtain would be embroidered with an image of the crucifixion, so that the host and the image of its meaning would be juxtaposed. In many churches the sexton would open the shutters on the choir windows so that light would shine on the host and the priest’s upraised hands. Priests and bishops criticized people for waiting outside the church until they heard the elevation bell, when they would rush in to see the consecrated wafer lifted up. And there are accounts of people racing from church to church around town so that they could see the miracle in as many places as possible.
Why did they do this? The literature is full of accounts – not just folk tales, but stories told from the pulpit, that special grace was associated with seeing the consecrated host. It was said that you wouldn’t age during the time you were seeing it. It was believed that you would not die unexpectedly and therefore unprepared on the day you had seen the host. It was said that you would not go blind on the day you had seen the host. There were many tales of hosts bleeding, or of Jews converted when they saw not bread but a baby in the priest’s upraised hands.
But these stories all come after the rise of this devotion. The devotion to looking at the host does indeed arise as communion becomes increasingly infrequent. This happens for reasons that are rather complex. During the this time, admonitions against receiving communion unworthily become more and more common, and receiving unworthily is generally understood to mean receiving without prior confession and absolution. The economics of confession, meanwhile, are becoming increasingly elaborate, with a system of indulgences which can be received for good works, prayers, or charitable contributions, and elaborate manuals that detail appropriate penance for every imaginable sin.
A cynic might suggest that increase in the admonitions to confess before receiving communion had something to do with the enrichment of the church through the penance system. And indeed, the cynic would be partially right. There is something else going on in the Middle Ages, though, that is at least as important to understanding Medieval piety. And that is death.
Bear in mind that in this time, despite increasing prosperity, safety and trade, life expectancy is short, and death is a regular part of everyday life in the Middle Ages. When the Black Death wasn’t decimating whole regions, which it seemed to do every time the population recovered enough to facilitate spread of the disease, infant mortality was still high (higher than 50% in many places), childbirth was the leading cause of death for women, and murder and war were tied as leading causes of death for men. Death was everywhere. In that culture, the Eucharist was understood primarily in relation to death. Most masses were said specifically for the dead – chapels were built and priests given salaries solely to say masses for the dead all day long. Even during Sunday mass, the side chapels of a church or cathedral might be filled with priests saying masses for the dead, and those chapels often had special windows called “squints” punched through their walls so that the priest could see the high altar and time his elevation to match that of the bishop or priest presiding there.
One of the understandings of the Eucharist often preached about was that of “viaticum” which means the provisions for a journey. Specifically it meant the Eucharist, given to the dying, or offered for the dead, would provide the sustenance necessary for the journey through purgatory into heaven.
And at the same time, the understanding of the sacrifice of the mass focused almost exclusively on Jesus’ death. The image in the priest’s Missal at the beginning of the Eucharistic prayer was that of Jesus dying or dead on the cross. What people saw when they gazed at the host was the flesh of the dead Christ, given for the world.
In this world it is no wonder that the Eucharist came to be understood as having to do primarily with death. And it is no wonder that people communicated infrequently. Why would they, if they weren’t dying? That’s what communion, in their world, was for.
Looking at the consecrated host, on the other hand, brought life. It brought grace, and health, and life to those who saw.
Let’s step back for a second and place this devotion in the context of the whole devotional life of the Middle Ages.
First, what were people doing in Church? They were seeing – not only the host, but the providential ordering of the cosmos as displayed in the gathered community and the statues and paintings in the church. Our view of the gothic cathedral is quite distorted because we see only the stone skeletons of churches whose insides were originally painted in gaudy colors and vibrating patterns, and covered with images, both statues and paintings, of the story of God’s people. Imagine, if you can, the interior of Notre Dame de Paris or Chartres entirely covered with vivid red, blue, yellow and gold leaf swirls, stars, stripes, zigzags, flowers and polka dots. If you have seen Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, you will have seen the norm, not the exception. That was the church in which the medievals worshipped.
They were hearing the solemn chanting of the choir and the recognizable Latin prayers such as the Pater Noster and the Credo. For the speakers of French, Italian, Spanish and other Romance languages, these prayers would have been more like our Rite I than a foreign language – intelligible with a little explanation. When we bear that in mind, it is hardly surprising that the reformers come almost entirely from places where non-Latin languages are spoken.
They would have prayed. The sermons and the primers for Lay People of the Middle Ages are full of prayers to be said at specific times during the mass – most of these prayers are vernacular paraphrases of what the priest is saying, set in verse so that they could be easily remembered.
It is interesting to note that with the reformation, there is an almost complete reversal in what is seen and heard. In a staunchly Puritan church, or in Zwingli’s Grossmünster in Zürich, the statues were removed, the walls were whitewashed and painted with phrases from scripture, a team of horses was hitched to the organ to drag it out of the choir loft, and the story of God’s relationship to humankind was now heard in the sermon, rather than seen in the icons of the assembly and the building, while the prayers that had formerly been heard were now seen in the text of the prayer books.
Outside of the Eucharist, the devotional life of the laity included processional liturgies throughout the town or city on special occasions. There were many types, but the one that arose last yet came to dominate was the Corpus Christi festival. The Feast of Corpus Christi was a celebration of Eucharistic devotion in which a consecrated host in a monstrance was carried in solemn procession around the parish, and stories from scripture were enacted in elaborate plays using fantastical scenery and special effects. Different trade or craftsmen’s guilds had responsibility for different stories, and the people would go from one place to another, or the wagons would be brought through in succession to in order to show the whole cycle of plays.
In addition, at this time, because of increasing safety on the road, pilgrimages became popular again, and great formal devotions grew up around the relics of particular saints.
The cult of the saints is, of course, another thing that the reformers rail against – one must use similar caution when reading the polemics of the reformers about it – the reformers had an interest in making the idolatrous extreme of the cult look like the norm.
It’s not clear whether private devotions were more prevalent or just better recorded, but we know that many of the laity, and especially lay women, had rich devotional lives which included both disciplined prayer and ecstatic visions. Julian of Norwich and Teresa of Avila are two notable examples – If you want to learn about some more extreme ones, I refer you to Caroline Walker Bynum’s Holy Feast and Holy Fast, which talks about women who lived entirely on consecrated wafers or the bodily secretions of the sick whom they tended out of devotion to God. It’s quite a read!
All of these practices seem outlandish to us, as indeed they would be if we were to practice them today. What we perhaps may best learn from the Middle Ages, though, if we can free ourselves for a moment from the interpretive biases of the ensuing centuries, is that as human beings we are drawn to God through the visual and the auditory in a fundamental way, and that the need to see and to hear will express itself in our devotional lives no matter whether it is helped or hindered by the institutional church. When we plan our worship, our buildings, our art, our vesture and our music, we should be mindful of how those things enable us to see and be seen by God, and to name and be named by God.