Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (61 page)

The highest and most powerful form of prayer the Church could offer was the Eucharist. In this drama of salvation, a priest led his congregation to a personal encounter with the Lord Jesus himself, in transforming bread and wine into body and blood on the altar. From the fourth century, the Western Church had come to call it the Mass, from
missa
, a late Latin form of the word [
missio
,] a 'sending' - in the liturgy of the Roman Mass current until the twentieth century, the priest enigmatically dismissed the people with the curious phrase '
Ite missa est
', 'Go, it is the sending.' So as laity sought the prayer of priests, they especially wanted the power of the Mass. This changed both its character and that of monasteries and the prayer they offered. Monks had rarely been ordained priests in earlier centuries, but now they were ordained in order to increase the output of Masses in a monastic community. Accordingly, the Mass began to change from the weekly chanted celebration of Eucharist on which congregational life in the early Church had centred. Now it commonly became a spoken service, the 'Low Mass', to be said as often as possible, often with only a server as token congregation. Because a Mass needed an altar, side altars began multiplying in Charlemagne's abbey churches, so that many Low Masses could be said alongside the sung High Mass which remained the centrepiece for the whole community at the high altar.
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This never happened in the Eastern Churches, where the service of Eucharist is still always sung, as are all other parts of the liturgy, sermons excepted. Hence that immediate contrast in visual impact which one feels entering Orthodox or traditional Catholic churches. In the Orthodox building, there will be one altar behind its iconostasis (see pp. 484-6); in the Catholic, the high altar has its attendant host of side altars, just as often visible in the main body of the building as in their own side chapels.

It was also in this era of monastic development that the Western Church began adapting its Latin liturgy to provide Masses which would give particular mention of the dead, for use at the time of a burial, or at intervals of time thereafter. They came to be called 'requiems', from the opening phrase sung or spoken as the service began, '
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine
', 'Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord'. Although Orthodoxy also has its services for the dead, they are significantly not Eucharists. There is nothing in Orthodox liturgy quite like the purposeful concentration on the passage of death to be found in the developed Latin service of requiem Mass, with its black vestments, its dark-coloured candles and its sense of negotiating a perilous path. Nothing else has so effectively conveyed the fullness of the Church's power over the faithful. Through the centuries the liturgy of the requiem gained extra texts, a twelfth-century sequence forming one of Christian liturgy's starkest presentations of human horror at death, judgement and damnation, the
Libera me
and
Dies irae
. This has continued to inspire Western composers to some of their most dramatic musical settings, even as the temporal power of the Church has faded, as those who cherish the Requiems of Giuseppe Verdi, Gabriel Faure or Maurice Durufle will vividly remember:

Deliver me, O Lord, from eternal death on that fearful day,
when the heavens and the earth are moved,
when you come to judge the world with fire.

I am made to tremble and I fear, because of the judgment that will come,
and also the coming wrath.
when the heavens and the earth are moved,

That day, day of wrath, calamity, and misery, day of great and exceeding
bitterness,
when you come to judge the world with fire!

Carolingian monasteries were not merely concerned with fighting sin and death; they were useful as a means of cutting down the numbers of claimants to a noble family's lands. Send spare sons or daughters off to a convent, for what more honourable life could there be than that of a monk or nun? This was particularly valuable for women. During the early medieval period, the monastic life offered a golden opportunity for talented women of noble or royal families to lead an emancipated, active life as abbesses, exercising power which might otherwise be closed to them and avoiding the unwelcome burdens of marriage. In the privacy of a nunnery with a good library, they and their nuns, who also tended to be from elite families, might become as well educated as any monk. Working within the conventions of the society of their time, they played as great a part in the life of the Church at large as their male equivalents, the abbots, or indeed as bishops. In fact those abbesses presiding over the greatest houses came to wear the headgear worn by abbots and bishops which symbolized authority in the Church: the mitre.

The pioneers among royal abbesses actually predated Carolingian monarchy by a century and appeared far beyond the northern border of the Frankish realm. They were Anglo-Saxons, members of the Wuffingas, in the later seventh century the royal family of East Anglia. One of the first, Princess Aethelthryth (Etheldreda or Audrey), managed to remain a virgin through two royal marriages; she was latterly Queen Consort in Northumbria, before she separated from her long-suffering husband after twelve years and returned to her homeland in 673 to found her own double monastery for monks and nuns. She chose an island called Ely, protected by the expanses of fenland which formed the western frontier of her family's kingdom - maybe her abbey could be seen as part of its border defences - and she became its first abbess. Twenty years after her death, her entombed corpse continued to make its presence felt. Having triggered enough miracles to demonstrate sanctity, it was solemnly reburied in a shrine which attracted a growing stream of pilgrims to her island retreat, and Etheldreda's memory is still honoured by the Anglican Dean and Chapter who now cherish the magnificent Romanesque cathedral on its bracingly windswept scarp. Such royal princesses were invaluable in bringing a sacred character to their dynasties, now that kings were subject to the Church and could not fully play the role of cultic figures, as they had in pre-Christian religions.
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None of the roles of a Benedictine monastery just described - scholarship, eucharistic intercession or social engineering - had played any part or received any mention in the Rule of St Benedict. Nevertheless, because of them, the ninth to eleventh centuries were a golden age for monasteries of the Rule; the survival of European civilization would have been inconceivable without monasteries and nunneries. One ninth-century manuscript, which survives in its original home in the incomparable library of the Swiss Abbey of Sankt Gallen, contains the plan of an elaborate monastery which was created as an ideal rebuilding of the abbey. In it we see a layout which did indeed become standard for Benedictine houses for centuries: church, dining hall, dormitories and assembly hall (chapter house) grouped round a central cloister yard, with a host of lesser buildings and gardens around them to service the community (see Plate 10).
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It is all very different from the haphazard collection of cells and buildings which formed earlier monastic enclosures such as those still surviving in the west of Ireland. The plan itself speaks of order, just like the Rule of Benedict, and the increasingly elaborate and majestic cycle of liturgy in the monastery church, in the midst of a world which, for very good reasons, neurotically sought order and reassurance. Such communities seemed indeed like the City of God: an image of Heaven. The vision of order and regularity which the Benedictines represented was just what the rulers of the Carolingian age were looking for. It is not surprising that people came to feel that regulars (clergy and people living under a monastic rule) were especially close to God, and that it was much more difficult for laypeople in the ordinary world to gain salvation. Later this produced a reaction among both secular clergy (those clergy not living under monastic discipline) and layfolk at large.

Charlemagne died in 814 and the empire which he had created did not long survive him as a single political unit. By 843 his family had divided the territories into three Frankish kingdoms. They and those who supplanted them on these thrones increasingly faced invasion from north and east by Vikings, Magyars, Slavs and Muslims; in the process, many of the struggling Christian outposts in northern Germany and Scandinavia which the emperors had encouraged, even beyond their borders, dwindled away, and only in the eleventh century was much done to revive them.
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Just as damaging as these external threats for the successor rulers, if not worse, was the return of powerful rivals among the nobility, who carved out territories for themselves in the form of duchies. West Francia, the predecessor of the later kingdom of France, proved particularly vulnerable to such encroachments during the tenth and eleventh centuries, and consequently the Capetian kings in Paris who ousted the last Carolingians in 987 clung with particular devotion to the great royal saintly cults of the Merovingian and Carolingian past as potential for strengthening their position. Indeed, anyone possessing or seeking power continued trying to annex the power of the Church in great monasteries for their own political purposes.

Monasteries were equally anxious to find protectors, but they were also conscious that they had a reservoir of sacred power to dispense. The most successful were those who saw that the popes in Rome could be useful allies: the pattern was set by that long-established abbey in central France, Fleury, and was later hugely developed by the Abbey of Cluny, as we will discover (see pp. 363-6). The enterprise of the monks of Fleury was not limited to burgling Italian cemeteries; as early as the eighth century, Fleury drew on its de facto possession of the bones of Benedict to negotiate the right to appeal directly to the pope against any bishop in the Frankish Church, and during the ninth century the abbey continued to enhance this useful weapon through creative manuscript forgeries. Popes were not slow to reward Fleury's succession of consecrated crimes with further privileges, and in 997 the abbey pulled off a triumphant coup: it gained papal recognition as the premier monastery in France and custodian of St Benedict. A subsequent pope in 1059 issued a similar privilege for Italy to the indignant monks of Monte Cassino, who now claimed that Benedict had not gone missing at all.
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This steadily increasing stream of papal benevolence reflected the fact that the flow of benefit was not in one direction only. An exclusive relationship with a flourishing Frankish monastery was good for papal prestige and influence over the Alps, at a time when the reputation of individual popes was, to put it charitably, not high. These were dismal years for the Bishops of Rome, at the mercy of powerful families in their city and rarely rising above their difficult situation. Edward Gibbon had some good clean anti-clerical Georgian fun describing the most notorious of them, John XII (reigned 955-63), descended from a lady of some notoriety named Marozia:

The bastard son, the grandson, and the great grandson of Marozia, a rare genealogy, were seated in the chair of St Peter, and it was at the age of nineteen years that the second of these became head of the Latin church. His youth and manhood were of a suitable complexion; and the nations of pilgrims could bear testimony to the charges that were urged against him in a Roman synod, and in the presence of [the Holy Roman Emperor] Otho the Great. As John XII had renounced the dress and decencies of his profession, the
soldier
may not perhaps be dishonoured by the wine which he drank, the blood that he spilt, the flames that he kindled, or the licentious pursuits of gaming and hunting. His open simony might be the consequence of distress: and his blasphemous invocation of Jupiter and Venus, if it be true, could not possibly be serious. But we read with some surprise, that the worthy grandson of Marozia lived in public adultery with the matrons of Rome: that the Lateran palace was turned into a school for prostitution, and that his rapes of virgins and widows had deterred the female pilgrims from visiting the tomb of St. Peter, lest, in the devout act, they should be violated by his successor.
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While the papacy languished, the Western Roman Empire recovered. The idea of empire persisted through its years of weakness, and during the tenth century it was given political reality once more in the eastern part of the old Carolingian dominions by Emperor Henry I (919-36) and his successor, Otto I (Gibbon's 'Otho the Great': 936-73). This Ottonian dynasty did its best to imitate the achievements of the first Western emperor, inspiring a spectacular new burst of creativity in architecture, art and manuscript illumination. In 972 the Emperor Otto II outdid the Carolingians: he married into the imperial family of Constantinople. His wife, Theophano, proved an effective governor for her son, who became emperor, behaved impeccably in her lavish endowment of monasteries as far north as the Low Countries, and did her utmost to bring the best of Eastern devotion to the West, including the dedication of major churches to Greek saints. Yet this initiative led nowhere. Theophano's young son, the Emperor Otto III, died in his early twenties in 1002, just as a marriage was being negotiated for him in Byzantium.
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Many in the West were pleased at the failure. One eleventh-century chronicler in Regensburg (in modern-day Germany) recorded with satisfaction the vision of a nun who saw the Empress Theophano pleading for forgiveness in shame for her sins, which he obligingly went on to specify as excessive luxury in clothing and customs, so corrupting to women of the West. Behind such misogyny lurked much greater differences between the Christian practice and belief of East and West. The fact that the Western Roman Empire continued to exist at all was a symbol that the two cultures had begun to take decisively different directions. There was steadily less understanding between the two sides, because communication between them was irregular, haphazard and often bad-tempered, and that meant that differences of theological outlook could fester: principally Charlemagne's addition of the
Filioque
to the Nicene Creed (see p. 350). Successive popes proved remarkably obstinate in resisting Carolingian pressure about the
Filioque
, showing that they were aware of the gravity with which Constantinople regarded the issue. Rome was one of the last places to adopt the
Filioque
into its liturgy, and eventually only did so in the early eleventh century, under pressure from the last Ottonian emperor, Henry II, who was campaigning against the Byzantines in Italy.