The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) (28 page)

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Authors: Anthony Esolen

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We have Saint Francis of Assisi, that barefoot fellow, “Frenchy,” as we might call him by name, stripping himself of the fancy clothes his merchant-father provided for him, but in his burlap not stripping off his love for the fancy creatures of God’s world. So he sings in his famous hymn:
 
Praised be You, my Lord, through Brother Fire,
through whom you light the night,
and he is beautiful and playful and robust and strong. (
Canticle
of Brother Sun,
17–19)
 
 
 
 
Church and State
 
The divine right of the anointed king was counterbalanced throughout the greater part of the Middle Ages by its conditional and revocable character; and this was not a mere concession to theological theory; it was enforced by the very real authority of the Church.
Christopher Dawson
,
Religion and the Rise of Western Culture
 
Else why do you think that statists such as Stalin took such risks in persecuting the Church? No despot, whether one man or a legislature or nine Nazgul perched on a judicial bench, wants his right to be “conditional and revocable.”
 
 
That love is sweetly captured in Giotto’s painting of Francis preaching to the birds, with a fellow friar nearby raising his hands in surprise and incomprehension, or in the amiable story of how Francis persuaded one Brother Wolf to stop harassing the good people of Gubbio, promising him a daily meal if he would leave them in peace.
13
 
Francis was not alone in this regard. Only someone who reveled in the humble and the earthy could give us Dante’s delicate description of a mother bird waiting for the dawn, so that she might fly from the nest to feed her chicks (
Paradiso
23.1–9), or Chaucer’s portrait of the luscious pin-up wench Alison, who tweezed her eyebrows that were “arched and black as any sloe” (“The Miller’s Tale,” 3246), or these lines steeped in the sweat and grime of a good deer hunt, written by a great anonymous poet:
 
Ah they brayed and they bled and died by the banks, while the racing dogs ran right on their tails, hunters with high horns hastening after, with a cry so clear it could shatter the cliffs! (
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,
1163–66)
 
 
Or we may see their taste for color, for the winsomeness of sky and leaf and flower, in the illuminated pages of the Duc de Berry’s
Tres Riches Heures
. My favorite page celebrates a truly Merry Christmas, with the work of that blessed time—feasting—rambunctiously going on, dogs and all, under the quiet order of the stars.
 
And those stars are filled with meaning. They are not random points of light in the sky, the debris of an old and meaningless explosion. They are signs in the book of God. Nature is all the greater in that it beckons beyond itself. If you take nature’s beauty to be final—if, like the old man in Chaucer’s “Merchant’s Tale,” you marry a frisky girl because a wife is a man’s sport and earthly paradise (1332), and that is all—you will be cruelly disappointed. “All flesh is grass,” says the prophet (Is. 40:6), and the people of the Middle Ages were quick to acknowledge that judgment. Where are the snows of yesteryear?” asks the affable rake Francois Villon, considering the beauty of ladies unremembered.
14
 
The ruling wisdom had it that all this wealth of beauty—the leaping of Brother Fire, or the gleaming smile of a little girl as she meets her father beside a stream whose bed is encrusted with jewels (
Pearl
)—is meant to lead man to contemplate its Creator, whose beauty does not fade. Naturally, people do not contemplate God all the time, and the medieval authors will cheerfully recount their rascality, as when a friar seduces a dimwitted lady by dressing himself up as the angel Gabriel (Boccaccio,
Decameron
4.2). Still the ideal is present and powerful. It beats warmly at the heart of the greatest thinkers and artists. Let’s take the greatest of those in turn: Dante and his theological master, Thomas Aquinas.
 
I was nine years old, says Dante, “when there appeared before my eyes the now glorious lady of my mind, who was called Beatrice,” that is, the woman who blesses, “even by those who did not know what her name was” (
The New Life,
II). From this chance encounter springs, in the transforming imagination of the poet, the allegory of love to which he devoted his poetic career. As he tells it, he fell in love with Beatrice, or rather this love overtook him, changing him from within. That is what happens when one encounters and submits to divine beauty,
 
. . . for where she goes
 
Love drives a killing frost into vile hearts
 
that freezes and destroys what they are thinking; should such a one insist on looking at her, he is changed to something noble or he dies. (
The New Life,
XIX)
 
 
Now of course a young man in love is prey to self-pity, and the callow Dante was no exception, as he relates to us his youthful infatuation. But after Beatrice dies young, and Dante has been jolted from his ensuing spiritual dullness by a vision of glory, he resolves to do for her what had never been done in honor of any woman before. The result will be the poem we call
The Divine Comedy—
wherein that earthly woman named Beatrice Portinari, whom Dante beheld and loved, will lead the poet’s vision to heaven and to the face of God. Nor is that simply a subject for a fascinating poem. Dante is quite serious about it; the hope enlists all the ardor of his mind and heart. For even after he writes his incomparable tribute, he says, he shall yearn for more:
 
And then may it please the One who is the Lord of graciousness that my soul ascend to behold the glory of its lady, that is, of that blessed Beatrice, who in glory contemplates the countenance of the One
qui est per omnia secula benedictus
[who is for all generations blessed]. (
The New Life,
XLII)
 
 
Perhaps the reader is not interested in learning how a young love led to the wonder of
The Divine Comedy
. That would not surprise me. We find it hard to imagine how loving a pretty but otherwise seemingly ordinary woman can open the soul up to the vistas of paradise. That, too, without one’s ever having been granted a kiss. But that is the point. We cannot imagine it, not because the medievals lived in some gauzy daydream of another world, but because we do not feel as intensely as they the beauty of this or any world, “beauty” having been demoted to a matter of taste, as of crackers or postcards. Our teachers preach it as dogma. No doubt we
experience
beauty subjectively—I happen to find the polyphonic music of Palestrina wondrously complex and lovely, while your heart may rather be touched by the brooding fury of Beethoven. But to say, flatly, that the beauty of their works does not itself really exist has consequences. Cold and ugly modern art and atonal concerts are bad enough, but worse than those is the assertion that there is no real order in things; all is random and without purpose. And how can anyone fall in love with the random and purposeless?
 
But medieval man’s faith in an ultimate and immutable beauty whetted the appetite. So for three centuries, almost everything that people write or preach or sing has to do with love, with passionate love. Dante is at the peak of a long tradition. “Now one who asks for a kiss,” writes the austere monk Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, “is in love. It is not for liberty that she asks, nor for an award, not for an inheritance nor even knowledge, but for a kiss . . . With a spontaneous outburst from the abundance of her heart, direct even to the point of boldness, she says, ‘Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth’.”
15
Bernard is talking about the faithful soul, longing for God. If such longings are hard for the modern heart to bear, we can turn to William of Aquitaine, the first great troubadour of Provence. In one song he pretends to be deaf and dumb so he can enjoy bedding down with two ladies at once. They give him a surefire test: they drag a big red cat down the side of his naked body, to make him cry out. When he still makes no sound, they let him have his way with them, maybe more than he’d wanted, for eight whole days. “No, no!” he moans at the end of the poem, “I cannot tell the vexation, it hurt so bad!” He is not, ahem, talking about the scratches he got from the cat.
16
 
 
 
Jews in the Middle Ages
 
Pope Gregory X in 1272 issued a papal bull regarding protections for Jewish people:
 
No Christian shall compel [the Jews] or any one of their group to come to baptism unwillingly... No Christian shall presume to seize, imprison, wound, torture, mutilate, kill, or inflict violence on them . . . No one shall disturb them in any way during the celebration of their festivals . . . The testimony of Christians against Jews shall not be valid unless there is among these Christians some Jew who is there for the purpose of offering testimony.
 
 
And the protections continue, by order of the Pope, repeating similar proclamations by his predecessors, particularly Gregory the Great. We forget how difficult it was to ensure that secular officials thousands of miles away obeyed such orders as these, in the days before instant communication. If you were Jewish in western Europe, the closer you were to Rome, the safer you were.
 
 
The trick of it was, in art and in life, to find the harmony between earthly beauty and heavenly beauty, to fall so deeply in love that no earthly creature could finally satisfy the longing, although love could and did lead you along the way to that satisfaction. Or it could lead you astray from it, if you indulged a sinful love.
 
So Lancelot, after years of betraying his friend and king by sleeping with the gentle (and treacherous) Queen Guinevere, must turn from that love, if he would do right by himself, his king, his queen, and God. If he did not love the queen as his idol, he would have no problem setting her aside; and if he did not long for God, he
would not
set her aside. It is precisely the strong passion that we admire, and that we in our art cannot find the strength to celebrate. At the moment of his repentance Lancelot wept “as bitterly as if had seen the object of his dearest love lying dead before him, and with the desperation of a man at his wit’s end for grief” (
The Quest of the Holy Grail
).
 
That struggle between what we ought to love best and what we do love instead provides the medieval poet with terrifically fruitful ground to work. Should Isolde give way to her love for the handsome and courtly Tristan, even though she is married to his uncle, King Mark of Cornwall? Or is sexual desire too powerful to resist? Is that what the poet Beroul means when he has her drink the potion that turns her heart toward the young man? If love brings joy and life, why is it self-destructive?
17

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