Chapter ii proposes for a theme the scorning of the world (_De mundi
contemptu_), and for its text, “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.” Distinguishing the vanity of this world as thus typically threefold, Alain quotes _Romans_ and the Psalms and adds Persius. “Thus the preacher should confirm each division of his text. His next step is to show where is vanity, where vanity of vanities, where all is vanity.... The scorning of the world, thus established by the way of the world itself, should be established also by consideration of man’s end (_a causa finali_).” The peroration apostrophizes human blindness (_O homo, si mundana_, etc.).
In a word, Alain furnishes a specimen order and procedure. Succeeding chapters thus present other usual topics: scorning of oneself, gluttony, the other deadly sins, the heavenly hope, spiritual grief and joy, patience and each of the other virtues, love of God and of one’s neighbor, etc. The remaining headings of his prefatory division are taken up at chapter xxxviii; and his consideration of different types in congregations has the humor to include the sleepy. The title _Summa_, then, implies a preacher’s book of reference, with advice and direction subordinated to classified material. The distinction of this _Summa_ is its systematic conciseness.
D. SYMBOLISM
Much more distinctive than any provision of collection or manual for ordinary use of a common fund is the prevalence of symbolism. The “moral” exposition that followed the literal commonly had this direction. For medieval symbolism was not merely a habit of exposition; it was seen as well as heard because it was a habit of conception. The cathedrals still exhibit in sculpture and glass what came in words from their pulpits. The Psalms, especially those recurring in the daily offices, thus conveyed from generation to generation the eternal word of God. For every psalm was the lyric cry of David, or of some other ancient Hebrew, only in the first instance (_litteralis expositio_). It always meant more; and its further meaning (_moralis expositio_), as cumulating progressive experience of God, was more important. It always meant not only David, but every other soul thus answering God, the “poor man” of every time and of every clime, every individual then and there focusing and enlarging by those words his own experience.
So far the “moral” interpretation treats the psalm as an extreme case of literary inspiration, appropriates it as having the universal validity of every lyric that has survived the centuries. A religious classic, more widely and intensely spiritual than any other body of lyrics, the psalter is still only a classic. But medieval interpretation always took a third step. Every psalm meant not only David, and further not only every “poor man” making it his own, but also “the man,” the Lord incarnate to share all humanity and to give men “power to become the sons of God.” Thus the Psalms spanned the centuries, connected the New Testament with the Old indivisibly, and were the voice of man in every age answering God in the Church. The habitual use of the Old Testament, and even of secular history, as prefiguring is here focused in its simplest form.[30] Simplest and commonest instance of symbolism, the interpretation of the Psalms is characteristic. Though not, indeed, peculiar to the middle age, it opens a widespread medieval habit.
The habitual use of the _Song of Songs_ as symbolic of the Christ and his Church reminds us that symbolism is essentially poetic. It was the usual poetic of medieval preaching in interpreting not only the Scriptures, but all human experience. As behind the word lay spiritual meaning, so behind the veil of the senses lay the realities of life. The so-called “otherworldliness” of medieval preaching is no ignoring of physical facts; it is a sustained and consistent call to see through them. What medieval philosophy defined as seeing “in the aspect of eternity” (_sub specie æternitatis_) medieval preaching inculcated as a habit of vision. The habit might, indeed, degenerate, as in that popular manual of the fourteenth century, the _Speculum humanæ salvationis_,[31] into extravagance or minute formalism; but even so it kept some view of history as a providential progress. It might rise, on the other hand, to express the immediate apprehension of the mystic, the vision of spiritual genius. But the distinction of the medieval mystic is rather in degree than in kind. The whole age is characteristically habituated to mysticism. No other poetic vision is equal to Dante’s; but no other form of poetry in his age, whether in verse or in sermon, is commoner than the vision.
Not only to the rapt was the visible world eloquent of the unseen eternal.
Full, indeed, is everything of supernal mysteries, abounding each in its special sweetness if the eye that beholds be but attentive, as of him who knows how to suck honey from the stone and oil from the hardest rock. St. Bernard, _De Laudibus Virginis Matris_, I. 1; PL 183: 56.
In the following sermon of this series St. Bernard refers seriatim to the accepted prefigurations of the Blessed Virgin. She is the perennial antagonist of the serpent (Genesis iii. 15), the _mulier fortis_ of Solomon (Proverbs xxxi. 10), the burning bush (Exodus iii. 2), Aaron’s budding rod (Numbers xvii. 8), Isaiah’s rod from the root of Jesse (xi. 1), the rod that smote the rock (Exodus xvii. 6) and divided the sea (Exodus xiv. 16), Gideon’s fleece (Judges vi. 37-40), the woman who is the Lord’s new creation (Jeremiah xxxi. 22). The prefigurations of this list had an obvious appeal in sermons through being familiar in hymns, in sculpture, in glass. Evidently St. Bernard loved them for their poetry; but he is also convinced of their sanction. He even formulates the theory of symbolic prefiguration.
These words [“To-day ye shall know that the Lord will come”], indeed, have in Holy Writ their [historical] location in place and time; but not incongruously have they been adapted to the vigil of the Lord’s Nativity by mother Church—the Church, I say, she who has with her the counsel and spirit of her Spouse and God.... When, therefore, she changes or shifts words in Holy Writ, her combination (_compositio_) has more weight than the passage in its original place, the more, perhaps, the greater the distance between figure and fact, between light and shadow, between mistress and handmaid. St. Bernard, _In Vigilia Nativitatis Domini_, III. 1; PL 183: 94.
His second sermon for Advent carries out the prefiguration of the rod, or stem (_virga_).[32]
From these passages I think it now manifest what is the stem proceeding from the root of Jesse, and what is the flower on which reposeth the Holy Spirit. For the Virgin Mother of God is the stem, her son is the flower, flower indeed the son of the Virgin, flower white at once and ruddy, the chosen from thousands (Cantic. v. 10), flower that angels desire in their visions, flower at whose fragrance the dead have revival, and, as he himself beareth witness, flower of the field (Cantic. ii. 1), not of the garden. Flowereth the field without human ministry, not by sowing of any one, not upturned by spading, not from without made fertile. So entirely, so the Virgin’s womb hath flowered; so inviolate, unimpaired, and chaste the body of Mary as the pasture of the eternal vigor hath burgeoned its flower, whose is a beauty beyond corruption, whose a glory unfading forever. O Virgin! stem of the highest, to what a summit thou liftest on high thy holiness! even to him that sitteth on the throne, even to the Lord in his majesty. Nor is that a great marvel, since thou has sent so deep the roots of thy meekness. O truly celestial plant, that art precious above all and holy above mankind! O true tree of life, which alone was worthy to bear the fruit of salvation! _De Adventu Domini_, II. 4; PL 183: 42.
The symbolism of his sermon in the Epiphany octave on the marriage at Cana is specifically moralized.
Now, methinks, ye have fathomed to what my words are tending. To-day ye have been hearing the wonder performed at the marriage, beginning indeed of the Lord’s tokens, even as a story sufficiently wonderful, and in significance still richer in gladness. Great indeed was the sign of the heavenly power, that water turned into wine at the Lord’s bidding; but far better that other changing at the right hand of the Highest which in this one is prefigured. We are bidden every one to the spiritual marriage at which of a truth the bridegroom is Christ our Lord. Wherefore we sing in the Psalter: _And he as a bridegroom coming forth from his chamber_ [Psalm xviii. 6]. Spouse indeed are we to him, if this seem not to you incredible, both all together one spouse and every soul by itself a spouse singly. But when can this be conceived of its God by human weakness, that we should be his beloved as a bride is beloved by her bridegroom? Far enough is this bride below her bridegroom in origin, below in her nature, below in her dignity. Nevertheless for that ancient Æthiop woman the son of the eternal king from far made his advent, and that for his own he might espouse her, feared not even to die for her. Moses, indeed, took to wife an Æthiop woman, but his marriage availed not to change the Æthiop’s color: Christ will present his bride, whom he loved in her baseness and all her foulness, glorious with his own glory, his Church without spot or wrinkle. Aaron may murmur; Miriam (Maria) may murmur, not the new, but the old, not the Lord’s mother, but Moses’ sister; not, I say, our Mary, she who shows her solicitude if some lack perchance is found at the marriage. Ye, therefore, as is meet, amid the murmurs of the priests, amid the murmurs of the synagogue, give your entire devotion to these our common acts of praise and thanksgiving. _Dominica Prima post Octavam Epiphaniæ_, II. 2; PL 183: 158.
Such preaching shows the same preoccupation as the symbolic windows of the cathedrals, their carved capitals, above all the thronged but harmonized groups of their great porches. It is not merely conventional illustration; it is a constant and consistent reminder of the history of mankind as a scheme of redemption.
E. COMPOSITION
1. Imaginative Method
The most conventional form of symbolism is allegory. This may be no more than what Lowell calls “personification by capital letters,” as in the Vice and Virtue, the Reason, Feeling, or Nature, of the eighteenth century. Even so it has more point when the convention is as instantly recognizable as the seven deadly sins of medieval capitals and poems, or the four cardinal and the three theological virtues, or even the seven liberal arts, each with appropriate costume, attitude, gesture, or action. How pleasant allegory may be in verse is evident in the wide popularity of the _Roman de la Rose_.
But no less evidently such pictorial aggregation offers little to preaching, since it has no vigor of composition. To be moving, allegory as well as higher symbolism must be narrative. The classic demonstration of this, the _Pilgrim’s Progress_, was written by a preacher. The art has never been more widely or more expertly pursued than in the middle age. The fourteenth-century English _Piers Plowman_ suggests even more vividly, with its strongly oral manner, how allegory might move in preaching. A sermon might be not only enlivened by passages of easily recognizable description; it might further be vivified by making the figures individuals and by putting them into speech and action. A complete demonstration is furnished in the interlude, prologue, and tale of Chaucer’s Pardoner. That accomplished rascal is made to display the whole art of oral narrative, from its vulgar drama to its high ranges of symbolic suggestion. The case is extreme; but the method has been a resource of popular preaching from the days of Nathan’s rebuke to David down to the present. Oral narrative, often with dramatic dialogue, has been heard again and again, both in such base uses as the Pardoner’s and in such urgency of message as Bunyan’s, because it has been found surely persuasive.
Here is the high art of the _exemplum_. Often the medieval record puts us off with a summary; sometimes the manuals give a mere note, “Tell the story of so-and-so”; but sometimes there are clear clues to such narrative art as makes the Pardoner’s tale breathless. An _exemplum_ of Walter Map’s lets us divine how dramatic the tale might be in the pulpit.
But for other men the monastic life turns out otherwise. Far more pitiable was the fate of a noble and eloquent man who, likewise a monk of the same community, was in the same case recalled to arms. [After winning great fame as a warrior, he had in penitence become a monk, vowing never again to shed blood. But when the countryside was harried, his old comrades dragged him forth, in spite of his protests, and made him lead them once more.] Enduring many reverses of battle with a noble fortitude, he was always reanimated by defeat to fight again, and, inflamed as it were with new ardor, would fly at the enemy the more fiercely, and whether they fled or held their ground, would indefatigably stick to them like glue. When the enemy sought to crush him by the size of their company, they found that victory goes to bravery, not to numbers. Burning with wrath, therefore, and increasing their force many fold, they surprised him in a valley hemmed between two cliffs, and had him almost trapped. No hope, for he was caught; no issue, for he was held; they went to work the more leisurely because the more securely. But he, bursting into their midst like a tempest, scatters them like dust in a whirlwind, and so stupefies them by his daring that they see nothing to do but run. Promptly he hangs on their rear with his band, small enough in comparison with theirs; and the throng of the enemy, in the effort to save their lords from him, becomes the prize of a single monk. But one leader of that attack, after escaping, makes a detour ahead and, mingling unrecognized with the monk’s men, works back steadily toward the monk, risking his own life to take his. The monk, almost stifled with toil and sun, calls his page, enters a vineyard, doffs his armor, and, while his band passes on, stretches himself half-stripped to the air under the shade of a tall vine. Then the skulker, leaving the line of march and slipping up stealthily step by step, pierces the monk with a deadly dart and escapes. The monk, knowing himself near death, confesses his sins to the page, the only person within reach, bidding him impose penance. He, being a layman, swears he knows not how. But the monk, extreme in his penitence as in everything, says: “Impose upon me by the mercy of God, dearest son, that in the name of Jesus Christ my soul may be in hell doing penance up to the day of judgment; so that then the Lord may have mercy upon me, lest with the wicked I behold the countenance of his wrath and anger.” Then replies the boy with tears, “My lord, I impose upon thee for penance that which here before the Lord thy lips have uttered.” And he, accepting with word and look, devoutly received the penance and died.
Here let us remember the words of mercy, In whatsoever hour a sinner shall repent, he shall be saved. Wherein he might have repented and did not, whether he omitted anything possible, we may discuss; and God have mercy on his soul. Walter Map, _De nugis curialium_, I. xiv.
2. Logical Method
Composition as a progress of thought, logical sequence, ordering by paragraphs, shows on the other hand little that is distinctively medieval. As in other times, differences here are rather individual. Bourgain does not establish his assertion of a general weakness of order;[33] and his addition that even St. Bernard proceeds by leaps[34] is extravagant. Lecoy de la Marche has more warrant for asserting that medieval sermons generally lack such sustained progress[35] as Bossuet’s. For often the course of a medieval sermon is not only shorter;[36] it is less sustained by a progress of paragraphs than forwarded by stages of emotion. The latter method may be for its audience no less valid. Indeed, preaching must learn poetic as well as rhetoric. Its composition, ideally embracing both, will be bent toward the one or the other by the particular preacher and audience. The medieval abeyance of sustained logical progress, if in fact it was general, may have been due to preoccupation with those poetic methods which were effective with some of the greatest preachers.
The school lore of rhetoric, however, was weak in the inculcation of logical progress. Busy with style, confusing in this study rhetoric with poetic, it offered too little practical guidance for preaching as composition. Doubtless the lack was filled in some cases by the teacher;[37] but the shift of pedagogy to logic implies, among other things, dissatisfaction with rhetoric.[38] What medieval rhetoric lacked, medieval logic, for all its triumphs in other directions, could not quite supply for preaching. The disputations of the schools, excellent for general training in oral fluency, in precision, in detecting and meeting error, could not reach the specific skill of continuously instructing, winning, and moving a silent congregation. They might even lead a vain or unwary preacher astray. Medieval preaching has been accused of habitual over-division, of tedious minuteness in headings and subheadings. Unfortunately such sermon divisions are not peculiar to any period. They seem no less common, for instance, in printed English sermons of the seventeenth century. But the medieval record, at least, does not always reproduce the actual preaching method.[39] Sometimes it gives little beyond the outline, which thus seems the more barren. Sometimes it uses a sermon as the occasion for further development, rather providing for future than following actual exposition of the text. Where the record seems to follow, there is evidence enough to make probable that the dominance of logic did deviate many late medieval sermons into over-analysis.
Analysis, the very function of logic, can never suffice, as Aristotle makes clear, for presentation. In preaching, its value is not for organizing, but for preliminary study. It is rather for the preacher than for his audience. It belongs rather in his notes than in his sermon. But though doctors analyzing daily in the schools might rely unduly on their habitual method when they preached, they preached oftenest to the schools themselves, that is to special audiences habituated to logical method. The popular preaching of the Franciscans can hardly have had that bent. The Dominicans, severely trained in logic, were also trained specifically to preach. St. Bernard, preaching both to monastic communities and to the people, will not be accused of over-division. Neither St. Anthony of Padua nor St. Bernardine of Siena can have set Italy on fire with elaborate analysis. These considerations, though largely _a priori_, are at least as weighty as contrary inferences from the sermon record. They permit the belief that medieval preachers realized as generally as preachers of other times the apothegm of St. Ambrose: _Non in dialectica complacuit Deo salvum facere populum suum_.
F. STYLE
Medieval sermons, for all the defects of transmission, offer ample and various demonstration of the force and beauty of medieval Latin. In contrast to the archaistic composition of the Renaissance, medieval sermon Latin moves at its best with ready variety and even in ordinary use with easy fluency.
1. Rhythm
Pierre de Celles,[40] fairly typical of ordinary expertness, is clearly rhythmical. St. Bernard’s ardor and winsomeness, the oral immediacy of his expression, appear in no resource of his style more strikingly than in his very pace.[41]
We have heard with our ears what is full of grace and worthy of acceptance: “Jesus Christ the Son of God is born in Bethlehem of Judah.” My soul hath been melted at this announcement; but my spirit in my breast is surging in haste to utter this joy and this exultation of your desire at the time appointed. Jesus is interpreted Savior. What so necessary to the fallen, what so desirable to the wretched, what so useful to the hopeless? Nay, elsewhere whence is salvation, whence even some slight hope of salvation, in the law of sin and the body of our death, in the evil of the present day and the place of our affliction, unless it were born to us anew and unlooked for? Thou perhaps desirest salvation; but the bitterness of the remedy, when thou thinkest alike of thy weakness and of thy illness, affrighteth thee. Fear thou not. Christ is very gentle, mild and of great mercy, anointed with the oil of gladness above his fellows, who receive, though not his very fulness, yet some of the fulness of his anointing. But lest thou, hearing his gentleness, shouldst undervalue the might of thy Savior, cometh his title, the Son of God. _In Vigilia Nativitatis Domini_, VI. 1; PL 183: 109.
Now let us return unto Bethlehem, and let us see this word which is wrought, which the Lord hath wrought and hath shown to his people. House of bread it is by old rendering; good for us there to tarry. Where hath been the word of the Lord, naught shall fail of the bread which shall strengthen the heart, as saith the prophet: “Comfort thou me according unto thy word” (Psalm cxviii. 28). In every word from the mouth of God proceeding mankind liveth, liveth in Christ as Christ in him is living. _Ibid._ 10; PL 183: 114.
Happy then forever are these our brethren, who now have been freed from the snare of those that hunted them, who from the tents (_tabernaculis_) of our campaigning to the halls where we shall be resting have made their passage, their fear of evil lifted, their hope singly and fully now established. This is the faithful, all the faithful body, greeted in “There shall no evil happen unto thee; neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling” (_tabernaculo_: Psalm xc. 10). _In Psal. Qui habitat_, XI. 2; PL 183: 225.
2. Balance and Rime
Balance, beloved of occasional orators from Gorgias down,[42] is useful in sharpening the iterations and contrasts of preaching.
Human weakness must realize its limitation.... The counsel of preaching, rather the counsel of the truth itself and of the divine reason, calls on man to yield his own reason. Let him fear not to yield himself entirely, following God entirely, and boasting in the Lord entirely, knowing him in whom he believes as able to keep the deposit of oneself and to give it increase (2 Tim. i. 12). He will restore thyself to thee, and with interest. He takes it as earthly, to restore it in heaven. He takes it in humility, to restore it exalted. He takes it as diminished, to restore it perfected. He takes it as empty, to restore it face to face with God in contemplation. He takes it corrupted, to render it incorruptible. He takes it in wretchedness, to render it happy, transferring a creature of time to the eternal, man unto the godlike. Achard of St. Victor, _De septem desertis_[43] (peroration).
Such balance often leads, through mere inflectional correspondence, to rime. That rime of clause with clause was avoided as a vice even in classical Latin is an exaggeration of Renaissance scrupulosity.[44] The middle age, following rather Augustine and the tradition of the schools of Gaul,[45] found rime desirable, and often sought it to mark parallel or contrast. Simple, ordinary use of it is heard again and again in a sermon by Hilduin.[46]
Porro bruttis animalibus paleam littere relinquamus, et de medulla tritici panem vite confestim filiis porrigamus.
Elinand uses it to point an epigram.[47]
Quæsivit me diabolus, et invenit, et circumvenit; quæsivit me Christus, invenit et subvenit.
Richard of St. Victor’s rime often marks insistently exact balances.
Hic flos factus est nobis medicina, ex illo mel et cera, in ipso potus et esca; medicina in redemptione, potus et esca in justificatione, mel et cera in glorificatione.
Ex hac medicina sanitas sempiternæ incorruptibilitatis; ex ejus esca refectio internæ satietatis; ex ejusmodi potu ebrietas æternæ securitatis; de illius cera splendor summæ claritatis; in ejus melle dulcor indeficientis felicitatis.
PL 196: 1032.
It may mark a progressive iteration. Repeating _florida_ and _transeamus_ from what he has just said, he goes on:
Sternamus itaque viam nostram floribus talibus, et per florida virtutum transeamus, munde et honeste procedamus, ut processionem nostram pulchram et gratam faciamus, et pascha floridum digna celebritate perficiamus. _In Ramis Palmarum_, PL 196: 1059.
Even such insistence remains within the limits of rimed prose; it is only extreme use of a widespread habit. Exceptional, on the other hand, since it repeatedly verges toward verse, is St. Anselm’s Lament of the Magdalen at the tomb.[48]
Audivimus, fratres, Mariam ad monumentum foris stantem; audivimus Mariam foris plorantem.
The device was so easily abused as to call forth more than one warning;[49] but it was so obvious a means of emphasis as to be widely prevalent.
3. Refrain
St. Bernard, though he does not avoid rime, shows habitually no need of it to strengthen his iterations. With him iteration often advances from rhetorical cumulation to poetical refrain.
“Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign. Behold a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel,” which by interpretation is God with us. Flee not, fallen Adam; for God is with us. Fear not, mankind, nor hearing the name of God be affrighted; for God is with us: with us likened by incarnation, with us by unification. All for us his coming, though he be one of us, like unto us in our suffering. _De Adventu Domini_, II. 1 (end); PL 183: 41.
His fifth sermon for the vigil of Christmas uses incremental iteration to contrast _to-day_ and _to-morrow_.
This our task to-day; for to-morrow’s shall be neither in sanctification nor in preparation, but in the very vision of majesty. “To-morrow,” saith the word, “ye shall see the majesty of God in you.” This is the meaning of the patriarch Jacob: “To-morrow unto me shall my justice make answer” (Genesis xxx. 33). To-day, indeed, justice is in observance; to-morrow it will answer: to-day it is practised; fruit cometh to-morrow. But that which man hath not planted neither shall he harvest. For neither shall he then behold the majesty who hath meantime made light of the holiness, nor shall the sun of glory rise for him to whom the sun of justice has not arisen, nor shall he see the light of to-morrow who has not been