Olsen-010-Intro
26/08/2015
9:01 AM
Page 1
The Aesthetics of Cædmon’s Hymn | 1
Introduction
The title of the present volume evokes a question that has been at the heart of
Glenn Olsen’s scholarly work from the beginning of his career, namely how
one generation understands itself in relation to the past as it moves into the
future. Bernard of Chartres’s image of the dwarf who sees farther because
he is perched on the shoulders of a giant expresses one of the ways twelfthcentury western Europeans understood themselves in relation to past and
future. In it we discern an awareness of progress, improvement, and achievement, but, in view of the diminutive and dependent character of the present
generation, that awareness does not amount to proud self-satisfaction. An altogether different sensibility appears seven centuries later, in Friedrich Nietzsche’s
image of giants who, ignoring the dwarfish mediocrities at their feet, call to one
another in lofty conversation across the ages.1 Here we encounter a determination to be free from the past and the puny standards of one’s immediate predecessors which, even as it criticizes modern culture, ironically discloses its
modernity.
In antiquity, the Middle Ages, and much of the early modern period, such
an assertion of independence was almost unknown. Before the era of Descartes
and the scientific revolution, which magnified the importance of innovation
and began to assert the superiority of the moderns over the ancients, even the
most original talents, Dante for instance, understood themselves to be embedded in and belong to that longer tradition. Those too prickly or defiant for
even an outward conformity, Peter Abelard for instance, risked censure or
worse. Pre-modern European culture was not a friendly environment for the
new thing, the latest model, or the assumption that change is intrinsically
choice-worthy.
1 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life §9, trans. Peter
Preuss (Indianapolis, 1980), 53.
Olsen-010-Intro
26/08/2015
9:01 AM
Page 2
2 | Introduction
Of course, change always did take place, willy-nilly, and human beings
from prehistory down to Mr Kurtz have encountered the horror of existing
within profane time, and the perilous task of identifying something permanent while living within a state of becoming. Olsen has been attuned to this
nexus of issues in western history from antiquity to the present. One way of
securing meaning was to deny the reality of the particular, the ephemeral, and
the contingent, or to insist that these things were deceptive appearances. As
Mircea Eliade explained half a century ago, primitive cultures often assigned
reality and meaning only to agents and actions that represented superhuman
archetypes and recapitulated the cosmogony.2 Such a view of things effectively
neutralized the threat of becoming by suspending profane time and, in a manner of speaking, abolishing history. Again, in some archaic historical cultures,
a few voices emphasized the illusory character of the flux of natural and historical particulars, and, with Parmenides, followed “the one way, that it is and
cannot not-be,”3 or, with Ecclesiastes 1:9 sought comfort in observing that
there is “nothing new under the sun.”
In one way or another, each of this volume’s ten studies shows that,
although preterit, the past is not simply gone, but always in some sense present,
always influencing what is done today. In some cases, the persistence of older
patterns and traditional expectations inhibited or limited the scope of individual action and accomplishment. This is especially true in the modern period,
with its emphasis upon the creative and originative power of the individual
human being. One ironic feature of the modern condition is that the assertion
of individual freedom from tradition has the greatest force and makes the most
sense in close proximity to the rejected tradition. The freedom prerequisite to
full self-expression and personal achievement is a freedom that can only be
understood in relation to the very traditions and inherited moral, cultural, and
intellectual order that it rejects. In the pre-modern west, and especially in the
Middle Ages, the persistence and wisdom of tradition were accepted as natural. This traditionalism of course did not alleviate all problems and conflict,
and Olsen’s many explorations of the interaction between present and past in
the Middle Ages have consistently drawn attention both to the possibilities and
limitations of human thought and action under any given set of circumstances.
2 Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return or, Cosmos and History, trans. Willard Trask
(Princeton, NJ, 1974).
3 Parmenides, fragment 28B2, in Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 6th ed., ed. H. Diels, 3
vols. (Berlin, 1951–1952), 1: 231.
Olsen-010-Intro
26/08/2015
9:01 AM
Page 3
Introduction | 3
Along with Augustine, Olsen levels a skeptical gaze at any claims about historical progress or historical decline simply speaking: “such as we are, such are
the times.”4 The essays collected here illustrate the variety of ways in which
ancient and medieval people adapted to the challenges and new circumstances
of the present by turning to aspects of their cultural past. Some of their efforts
yielded such impressive results that the creative possibility of pre-modern
mimetic strategies of renewal and reform is unmistakable. In other cases,
reliance on tradition either failed to provide an effective response to the immediate challenge, or triggered developments which themselves were problematic and at times unwelcome. In honor of Olsen’s many nuanced and rich contributions to our understanding of the dynamic of medieval and pre-modern
western cultures, his students and friends have gathered these studies illustrating one of the central themes of Olsen’s scholarly work, namely the continuous interpenetration between the present and the past.
Historical cultures in the pre-modern west generally avoided the extremes
of either denying the existence of mobile being, or embracing the idea of
change as intrinsically good. The former perspective was contrary to common
experience and was of little use either to workaday people or to men of action.
The latter would have been hard to imagine before the advent of modern science, industry, and communication. Instead, people who thought about these
things, and whose thought was recorded, tended to refer the new to the old;
that is, to understand the unfamiliar elements of the present in terms of the
familiar ways and ideas of the venerable past.
But this respect for the past was never quite unanimous or univocal, and a
great deal of Olsen’s scholarship directly or indirectly elucidates the ways western societies have rendered the past useful. Various strategies of renewal appeared
over the centuries, some based on the cycle of the cosmos, others based on the
regularities of plant and animal life. The great year, the golden age, the phoenix
reborn from its ashes, all shared a common assumption that renewal is not caused
by human will and effort, but something that occurs spontaneously at certain
intervals. These ideas, which had appeared in ancient pagan myth and poetry,
eventually found their way into the political ideology of the age of Augustus and
then surfaced again in the Christian-Roman Empire of Constantine and Theodosius. They also played a part in the themes of translatio imperii and renovatio
imperii Romani which persisted throughout the Middle Ages.
4 Augustine, Sermon 80.8, trans. R.G. MacMullen, in Select Library of Nicene and PostNicene Fathers of the Christian Church, 14 vols. (New York, 1886–1890), 6: 352.
Olsen-010-Intro
26/08/2015
9:01 AM
Page 4
4 | Introduction
A more radical sort of renewal ideology appeared when late Judaism produced messianic hopes of political utopia or apocalyptic transcendence, ideas
which helped shape Christian speculation about a thousand-year period of
abundance and perfection before the end of history and the Last Judgment.
Millennialism was present on the cultural fringes throughout the Middle Ages,
and attained a certain prominence in the writings of the twelfth-century Calabrian abbot, Joachim of Fiore. Joachim’s spiritual and ideological descendents
expressed millenarian hopes of a religious sort in the later Middle Ages and
Reformation era, and then of a secular and even materialist sort in the modern
period.
Antique and medieval renewal ideas may be understood in terms of mimesis or as the impulse to conform to a standard or archetype through imitation,
emulation, or emendation. In aristocratic societies, practices of long standing
gained normative force, and ancient ideas usually enjoyed unquestioned,
authoritative status. According to the late-fourth-century Symmachus and
other conservative pagan Romans, ancestral ceremonies and traditional pious
observances deserve respect and reverence simply because of their antiquity.
The customary way is best. Ancient and medieval Christians often looked back
upon the “primitive church” as an ideal that contemporaries should admire and
perhaps strive to recapture. Olsen’s many studies of the history of the idea of
the ecclesia primitiva almost always illustrate the idea’s normative force, whether
in legal, moral, institutional, or spiritual discourse.
These general observations about the persistence of the past in the thought,
imagery, and metaphors of authors and societies moving inexorably into the
future frame the first major part of the present collection. This section includes
three studies of medieval writers who showed older patterns recurring in the
present and who understood their circumstances primarily by reference to the
past.
In chapter one, “Mother, Father, King: Dhuoda and Carolingian Patriarchy,” Carol Neel discusses issues of reform ideology and individual self-consciousness in Dhuoda of Uzès. Dhuoda was an educated Frankish noblewoman
who in 824 became the wife of Count Bernard of Septimania, by whom she had
two sons. His stormy career was a major influence on her life and thought.
Although at first an ally and close counselor of Louis the Pious, Bernard later
made powerful enemies at the imperial court and was accused of having an
adulterous affair with the Empress Judith. Scarcely impeded by this and other
set-backs, the ambitious Bernard played various roles in the civil strife of the
830s but managed to survive the reign of Louis the Pious. He was less fortunate
Olsen-010-Intro
26/08/2015
9:01 AM
Page 5
Introduction | 5
in the wars among Louis’s sons. At first he made peace with Charles the Bald,
sending his older son, William, to Charles as proxy and guarantor of Bernard’s
good behavior, but later revolted unsuccessfully and was executed in 844.
Dhuoda is known only through her Liber manualis, a handbook she wrote for
the instruction of her son in 843 while he was a hostage at the court of Charles
the Bald.
Neel argues that the Manual’s ideology of reform reflects its author’s selfconsciousness as mother and laywoman. Dhuoda’s approach to reform becomes
evident when we attend to the familial and social implications of one aspect of
her Bible exegesis. Before Dhuoda, the description in Acts 4:32–34 of the community of the faithful in Jerusalem after the ascension of the Lord as “united
by one heart and one soul” had usually been understood in typological relation
to monastic or clerical community. In a study of his own, Olsen pointed out
that Dhuoda by-passed ecclesiastical position and paternal authority to view
the passage in relation to Christian society at large, thereby magnifying the
force of her own maternal voice and lay sensibility. Supporting and expanding
this insight, Neel explains how this maternal and lay perspective informed
Dhuoda’s attitude toward the established patriarchal authority. Because women
were expected to show deference to husbands, princes, and ecclesiastics, her
critique of the leaders of family and society had to be implicit and somewhat
veiled. But through a careful reading of the Manual’s silences alongside what it
does say, Neel develops an image of Dhuoda as sharply rebuking Bernard and
the Carolingian princes for failing to live up to biblical precepts regarding paternal and secular leadership. Intent upon gaining power and prestige, they have
neglected the common good of Christian society as a whole, and failed to
exhibit the intelligence, discretion, and brotherly love that were embodied in
Genesis’s long-suffering Joseph and even in some animals. Well before the
twelfth century, then, Acts 4:32–34 was taken to endorse an ecclesiology that
was not principally monastic or clerical, and to provide standards of conduct
that contrasted sharply with the practices of society’s natural leaders.
In chapter two, “Stages of Political Development: Twelfth-Century Ireland as Ninth-Century England,” James Muldoon highlights the conflict
between the realities of medieval Irish society and the normative view of nature
in the social thought of high medieval English authors who considered the conquest of Ireland. His aim is to show how the conquerors both understood and
misunderstood Irish society according to the stadial model of development.
This model, which was widely though not universally accepted in the west
from Aristotle to the Scottish enlightenment, identified certain natural stages
Olsen-010-Intro
26/08/2015
9:01 AM
Page 6
6 | Introduction
of social and political development leading to the urban, commercial, and constitutionally governed mode of existence worthy of the designation “civilized.”
Advancing through various modes of existence, from the hunter-gatherer to
the pastoral, from transhumance to sedentary and agricultural, from village to
town, from agricultural to commercial, each of these stages coincides with
characteristic sets of mores, sentiments, and habits of thought, the highest form
of which appeared in the civic culture of towns, which were considered the
proper environment for the good or flourishing life for human beings.
Muldoon finds clear traces of this general view in the twelfth- and thirteenth-century English evidence pertaining to Ireland. Thanks to figures like
Bishop Malachy of Armagh, it was known that Irish society was primitive in its
social and economic structures, politically disunited, and, though Catholic, quite
out-of-date in ecclesiastical structure and discipline. The English and Roman
belief was that Henry II and his army would provide the catalyst for social, economic, political, and religious progress in Ireland more or less as William the
Conqueror and his army had triggered such progress in Anglo-Saxon England.
Muldoon mentions several of the inaccuracies of such a view of Anglo-Saxon
history, but these apparently did not trouble English chroniclers of the conquest
and subsequent situation in Ireland. What they saw was a persistently tribal and
pastoral mode of existence, with its attendant sloth, indiscipline, and generally
primitive behavior. As for the church, it centered on monasteries and powerful
abbots who were, in effect, representatives of clans and who cared nothing for
the Gregorian Reforms that were so prominent in England and on the continent. Although they implemented a new political and ecclesiastical order, the
conquerors failed to change Irish social, economic, or cultural life, and, in fact,
in many cases over the next centuries the descendants of the colonizers themselves “went native” and were assimilated into the society their ancestors had
sought to change. In effect, the English conquerors understood twelfth-century
Irish society according to their historical memory of the situation in ninth-century England. This was neither the first nor the last projection of the stadial
model of social development onto foreign societies. Like other colonizers, say,
Romans in North Africa or modern Europeans in North America and Australia,
the English in Ireland considered the natives to be obdurate, lazy, or even not
fully human. In every case, the response to resistance has been further coercion,
closer supervision, and more intense efforts to bring the subject peoples into line
with a process that is understood to be natural. Muldoon, like Olsen, is clearly
a master at using a particular historical example to call readers to examine widely
accepted assumptions about the nature of human social life.
Olsen-010-Intro
26/08/2015
9:01 AM
Page 7
Introduction | 7
While the twelfh-century English found the past in every way superior to
the present, the collection’s third study shows that respect for tradition could
be delimiting as a literary inspiration. In “Context and Process in the Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris: The Latin Historian’s Art in the Iberian High Middle
Ages” Bernard F. Reilly reassesses one of the major Latin medieval histories
of the reign of Alfonso VII, king of Galicia (1111) and later of León-Castile
(1126–1157), the first Emperor of all Spain. This is the story of repeated efforts
to integrate earlier historical records into a single work that would highlight
the meaning of recent developments by linking them to events of the past.
But the disparate character of the information contained in these earlier
sources, as well as the sources’ various literary forms, made it difficult or
impossible to produce anything from them but a chimera. As it stands, the
Chronica includes elements of the world chronicle, gesta, annals, and historia; its
focus drifts at times from the king himself to his subordinates and adversaries;
and in the end the work shifts from prose to verse for nearly four hundred
lines, cutting off abruptly after a preface to an epic account of the campaign
to capture Almería in 1147. In the end, baffled by his own traditionalist respect
for the past, the last author to work on it failed to order, shape, or even complete the Chronica.
Reilly endorses recent suggestions that Bishop Arnold of Astorga (1144–
1152) may have been involved at some stage of the project, and that the Chronica’s cobbled-together character is too pronounced to be the work of a single
author. He breaks new ground, however, by pointing out that we can learn
something about the minds and circumstances of the authors by attending carefully to tone, word choice, and field of vision. For example, the presence of
dramatic dialogue and relatively compact stories about the exploits and changes
of fortune of noble families suggest the influence of heroic tales and clan sagas
that the author had read or heard at court. These may well have included Muslim accounts which were known to have been available, some of them in Latin
translation, in the mid-twelfth century. As for the verse preface to the conquest
of Almería, its tone and vocabulary point to the early thirteenth century, as
do apparent references to the epic Cantar de Mio Cid, a work which in its classic form reached Catalonia only in or around 1207, more than a generation after
the death of Alfonso VII in 1157. In the end, the task of turning the original
Leonese annals into a history of the reign of Alfonso VII frustrated the authors.
This may be a case in which the aspiration to see a little farther was thwarted
by the very giant on whose shoulders this anonymous poet found himself
perched.
Olsen-010-Intro
26/08/2015
9:01 AM
Page 8
8 | Introduction
In part two of the volume we turn to several historical episodes that illustrate the clash between novelty and tradition, for the old ways did not always
receive the respect that traditionalists thought was their due. In times of crisis,
for instance, the late antique conflicts between rival Christian sects, or again in
the eleventh-century controversy in western Europe over episcopal investiture,
different normative standards, namely custom and truth, were pitted against
one another. Tertullian’s blunt statement that “Our Lord Christ called himself
truth [ John 14:6], not custom,” was echoed by Cyprian, the Carthaginian
Council of 256, Augustine, and, much later, Popes Gregory VII and Urban II,
and the canonists Ivo of Chartres and Gratian.5 Nor was it only Christians who
claimed that antiquity on its own was not sufficient grounds for regarding practices and ideas as right; Tacitus, for one, had pointed this out.6
When custom alone did not rule, the normative truth might be nature
rather than divine revelation. The exaltation of nature has taken many forms
in western history, but not the least among them is the belief that an earlier
stage of history or social development was better or somehow more in keeping with man’s nature or the natural order of the cosmos than current practice and conditions. This view of nature as normative has at times been associated with regret over the loss of ancient patterns of thought and action;
the ancestral way conformed better to nature than do the ideas and ways of
contemporaries.
Alongside this chronological primitivism is what has been called cultural
primitivism which looks not to the past but to contemporary savage societies
for the standard of nature. In this case the luxury, complexity, softness, or artificiality of civilized life brings to mind the primitive culture of those living
beyond the frontier. In most instances this image of the savage was a conflation
of real and imagined characteristics. The life of this other might be pictured as
simpler, easier, and more pleasant than civilized life; or it might be viewed as
tougher, stronger, and more manly than civilized life. But whether in one of
its soft or hard forms, cultural primitivism emphasizes that life among the savages is in many ways more natural and better than that of the so-called advanced
culture. Rousseau’s happy Caribs, who “among all peoples live closest to the
original state of nature,” were late additions to a tradition that in the west
5 For references and discussion see Gerhart B. Ladner, The Idea of Reform: Its Impact on
Christian Thought and Action in the Age of the Fathers (Cambridge, MA, 1959), 138.
6 Cornelii Taciti Annalium 11.24, ed. C.D. Fisher (1906; repr. Oxford, 1985), 225.
Olsen-010-Intro
26/08/2015
9:01 AM
Page 9
Introduction | 9
reached back to the fifth-century B.C.7 In one way or another, the ancient
Cynics, Stoics, and Epicureans idealized primitive man as leading a simple life
more in keeping with nature than do contemporaries.
Christian authors from Tertullian and Lactantius onward sometimes
appealed to nature as norm, just as monastic writers of late antiquity and the
Middle Ages engaged in a sort of cultural primitivism when they warned
against the vanity of the arts and sciences, and when they praised poverty, abstinence, and hard work. The idea of nature as the ascending order of things
played a central role in Stoic and neo-platonic presentations of the human being
as microcosmic analogue of the cosmos at large. Variations on this theme persisted throughout the Middle Ages. As for the scholastic authors of the twelfth
and later centuries, the discovery and gradual assimilation of Aristotle’s Physics
enabled them to see nature with such clarity and depth that it assumed unprecedented normative power in many fields. Although neither Aristotle nor
Thomas Aquinas championed chronological or cultural primitivism, for both
these thinkers the doctrine of nature as final cause, or “that for the sake of
which,” usually entailed some normative content.8
These general observations about conflicting standards and competing
norms furnish the background for the second major section of the present collection. Its three studies illustrate clashes between novelty and tradition in cases
drawn from ninth-century Francia and high medieval legal culture.
In the fourth chapter, “The Testing of Einhard’s Religious Authority,”
Paul Edward Dutton considers how prominent Frankish courtiers and churchmen turned to both the heritage and the very material of Christian Rome for
strength and guidance during the increasingly troubled reign of Charlemagne’s
successor, Louis the Pious (r. 814–840). Einhard’s career at the Frankish court,
and above all the Vita Karoli, reflects the ideology of renewal and sense of historical purpose that became conspicuous in the last two decades of Charlemagne’s reign. Although the pagan Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars was Einhard’s
main literary model in the biography, it is clear that Einhard’s Charlemagne
was a Christian Roman emperor. Charlemagne was not the first Carolingian
monarch to adopt the Roman church as the institutional, legal, and liturgical
model of the Frankish church, but he continued this practice. He also continued his father’s practice of transferring the remains of ancient martyrs and saints
7 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Part I, trans. Donald Cress
(Indianapolis, 1992), 40.
8 Aristotle, Physics 2.8, trans. Glen Coughlin (South Bend, IN, 2005), 37–40.
Olsen-010-Intro
26/08/2015
9:01 AM
Page 10
10 | Introduction
from the cemeteries around Rome to various churches within Francia, where
these holy objects served as focal points of piety and strongholds of spiritual
authority.
During the reign of Louis the Pious Einhard himself became an importer
of relics, and then wrote an account of that enterprise called Translation and
Miracles of the Blessed Martyrs Marcellinus and Peter. Dutton argues that the Translation allows us to see Einhard’s effort to withdraw from active life in the court
and, as lay abbot, to immerse himself in the religious life of church and cloister. Einhard’s initiatives in church construction and relic acquisition coincided
with the political tensions that finally produced devastating civil war in the
830s, and Dutton reasonably suggests that Einhard wanted to distance himself
from the conflict. But the Translation itself shows that so much power flowed
through the saints and so much prestige accrued to those who possessed their
physical remains that relic-collecting was risky business. Dutton shows in detail
how the document responds to the claims of Einhard’s rivals, both high and
low, as possessors of and spokesmen for the saints. In one way or another, both
the text’s linear, circumstantial narrative of events and its more episodic wonder stories – dreams, portents, speaking demons, letters from heaven, miraculous cures – amount to replies to Einhard’s challengers in the court and in his
own church, and provide the means of consolidating his position as religious
patron within his monasteries and churches. In this way, the tradition of Christian Rome enabled prominent figures of the Carolingian court to secure themselves in turbulent circumstances.
Martha Rampton shows in chapter five how the ninth-century contemporaries of Lothar II developed a language of the emotional community to
convey the promptings of the human heart. In her study, “Love and the
Divorce of Lothar II,” she examines the tension between tradition and novelty
in the unhappy marriage of Lothar II, grandson of Louis the Pious, son and
heir of Lothar I, and ruler of Middle Francia. The bride, Theutberga, daughter of an important Lotharingian count, found that the king already had a mistress, Waldrada, an Alsacian noblewoman, whom he was reluctant to dismiss.
This circumstance has never been uncommon in marriages of state, even in the
twentieth century, and the fact of the other woman need not disrupt the realm
so long as the line of succession is clear. Lothar’s situation became difficult,
however, after Waldrada and not Theutberga produced a son. The controversy
over the king’s effort to divorce Theutberga lasted well over a decade and eventually involved many of the great noble laymen of the Middle kingdom, but
also Lothar’s uncles, King Louis of Italy and Emperor Charles the Bald, the
Olsen-010-Intro
26/08/2015
9:01 AM
Page 11
Introduction | 11
Frankish episcopacy, and two popes, Nicholas I and Hadrian II. Lothar successively proposed to ecclesiastical officials wildly different reasons why his
marriage to Theutberga should be terminated, including alleging her pre-existing sexual relationship with her brother and then attempting to prove that he
and Waldrada had been married in a valid ceremony prior to taking Theutberga as a wife. The disparity among his explanations reveals the inchoate
understanding of marriage at the time and a lack of clarity about how the elements of sexual consummation and consent related to one another in the establishment of marriage.
Rampton focuses on several features of the case that have either been
missed or barely noticed by others, namely the element of romantic love and
the presence of magic. She argues that Lothar’s expressions of passionate love
for Waldrada and intense aversion for Theutberga were not only instrumental
and not merely formulaic, but appear to have been intended and perceived as
sincere statements of the king’s own feelings. To read the sources this way,
Rampton situates her account in relation to recent discussions of the history of
emotions and communities of emotional discourse in the early Middle Ages.
She concludes that “contemporary authors recognized emotional preferences
as a viable motivation for the choices surrounding the affair.” Contemporaries
were aware of the quality of affection (affectio) in Lothar’s bond with Waldrada.
Later generations of canonists would express marital affection as normative for
marriage, but at this time it had hardly begun to be explored, as the work of
social historian Fr Michael Sheehan has shown. Rampton’s contribution is to
show how passionate love was legitimated by Lothar through a community of
emotional discourse, with its own norms and traditions. As for magic, Waldrada was accused of ensnaring the king with love magic, and Theutberga was
said to have used sorcery to abort her incestuously conceived child. Rampton
contextualizes these allegations within a longer history of late antique and early
medieval amatory and birth magic. She concludes churchmen such as Bishop
Hincmar of Reims took these accusations seriously, and were keen to halt any
deviations from natural order and ecclesiastical norms. Lothar’s adventures
reveal how emotional communities could allow new ideas such as the role of
spousal choice to emerge within a culture.
In the collection’s sixth study, “Ius Fori and Ius Poli: The Juridification of
Classical Canon Law,” James A. Brundage shows that renewal through the use
of traditional ancient sources sometimes impelled thought and institutions in
unforeseeable and perhaps unwelcome directions. Brundage draws attention to
the high and late medieval movement of the study of church canons from the
Olsen-010-Intro
26/08/2015
9:01 AM
Page 12
12 | Introduction
orbit of theology into that of law, a change he describes with the term “juridification.” This movement was gradual but comprehensive and enduring, judging by the great number of canon lawyers who continue to hold posts in the
Roman hierarchy, and considering the many modern bishops, archbishops, and
popes who had formal legal training. In this case we find that those who turned
to the tradition of secular Roman law discovered such a well developed and
determinate body of legal reasoning that it introduced not only a set of tools
but a dynamic force capable of shifting the categories, practices, and disciplinary boundaries of the high and later medieval church.
Brundage sees the barbed and ironic references to jurists in the writings of
high medieval monastic and scholastic theologians as symptomatic of a larger
development, namely a parting of the ways of theologians and canonists. Down
until the twelfth century, the study of conciliar acta and papal decrees was
treated as a branch of theology, and even after the discovery of the Corpus iuris
civilis theologian-canonists evinced a certain disrespect and condescension
toward Roman law. From the later twelfth century onward, however, the utility of training in civil law gradually became apparent, both because the ancient
Roman jurists had developed the terminology and thought patterns required
for adjudication within any legal system, and in order to protect the church’s
own temporal interests. Brundage adduces a fascinating variety of evidence to
support his point: the ownership of Roman law manuscripts by canonists; the
study of Roman alongside canon law in the law faculties of transalpine universities; and the tendency of canonists to cite Roman law texts as authoritative. More familiar is the emergence of an official process of canonization that
was explicitly juridical in character. Even the sacrament of reconciliation, in
which the confessor had often been spoken of as a kind of judge, was recast
during the twelfth century into something more fully resembling a court of
law. In the thirteenth century a whole genre of reference books for confessors
emerged, the summae confessorum, and these books cited legal texts, both civil
and canonical, far more than they did sources in Scripture or theology. By the
end of the Middle Ages legal codes, canon lawyers, standing courts, and jurist
bureaucrats were so prominent in the church that in 1520, when he sought an
emblematic part to stand for the whole, Martin Luther publicly burned the
Corpus iuris canonici. These were some of the unforeseeable consequences of
mounting the shoulders of the Roman law giant.
One major type of renewal ideology is that of Christian reform, and Olsen
has explored it extensively in his writings. This view holds that while terrestrial perfection is out of reach, a relative perfectibility – the extent of which is
Olsen-010-Intro
26/08/2015
9:01 AM
Page 13
Introduction | 13
unforeseeable – is possible in a prolonged process that would likely involve
repeated conversions and frequent resort to the sacramental grace of penance
and the sacrifice of the Mass. As Kierkegaard put it, this sort of reform is
“repentance, which does indeed look back, but nevertheless in such a way that
precisely thereby it quickens its pace toward what lies ahead.”9 In this way the
world was understood as the scene of improvement and progress, and historical time was the medium in which sanctification occurred. Christian renewal
and reform are the subject of the third part of the collection.
Paul’s repeated references to putting off the old man and putting on the
new man according to Christ inspired ancient and early medieval Christian
authors to elaborate various images of reform. The second-century Irenaeus
and some others presented salvation as the restoration of mankind to Adam’s
state before the fall through the recovery of likeness to God made possible by
the Incarnation. In the third century Origen, and then in the fourth Athanasius,
wrote of the Incarnation in terms of renewal and restoration of an image. Like
a painted portrait that has been obliterated by stains, the indignity and dehumanization of sin had stained and effaced the created God-likeness of human
beings. Just as the former difficulty is best remedied by asking the subject of the
portrait to sit again so that the painter may restore the portrait, so too in the latter case the Son of God, the image of the Father, became man in order to renew
the likeness in human beings according to the divine archetype.10
Other late antique accounts of Christian reform came to emphasize progressive change to a new and better condition instead of the recovery of a previous one. Tertullian presented reform as the process by which through Christ
one becomes better than Adam was, and it was Tertullian who first used the
phrase “reform to the better” (in melius reformare). He argued that practices and
ideas should be judged wholesome or right not in relation to their antiquity
but in light of the rule of faith (regula fidei). Because the rule of faith is immobile, it may be used to improve one’s discipline and way of life with “the newness of correction.”11 Augustine too, though deeply indebted to his eastern
and especially Alexandrian predecessors, emphasized this progressive and
future-oriented aspect of reform. Thanks largely to the influence of Augustine’s Rule for monks and his many spiritual and educational works, this pro9 Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments IBc, trans. Howard Hong and Edna Hong
(Princeton, NJ, 1985), 19.
10 Athanasius, On the Incarnation 14, trans. John Behr (Yonkers, 2011), 63.
11 For references and discussion see Ladner, The Idea of Reform, 137–138.
Olsen-010-Intro
26/08/2015
9:01 AM
Page 14
14 | Introduction
gressive ideology of reform to the better became widely known in the
medieval west.
Whether understood as fundamentally restorative or progressive, the idea
of reform enabled one to view history as the scene of improvement and sanctification. According to some ancient and medieval authors historical sanctification was a corporate matter, and for them the providential direction of events
was clear enough. While some tended to view the mystical body of Christ on
earth as coextensive with the institutional church, others were apt to identify
the Christian Roman empire as the instrument of divine will in an unequivocal way. Just as in the fourth century Eusebius had celebrated the ascension and
conversion of Constantine as a real general advance for mankind, Otto of Freising in the twelfth saw in Constantine’s reign the merging of what he called the
civitas mundi with the civitas Dei. At times the modern reader suspects that such
pronouncements reflect not only the simple conviction that “God wills it!” but
also a prudent resolve to avoid displeasing powerful patrons, protectors, and, in
Otto’s case, blood relations in the ruling house. Even Alcuin, who knew that
the imperial policy of the Franks was not simply an expression of God’s will,
approached Charlemagne with circumspection when he expressed reservations
about the forced conversion of the Saxons.
Other thinkers emphasized personal change as most proper to Christian
reform. Although authors such as Gregory of Nyssa, Athanasius, and Augustine recognized that the process of sanctification occurs in the church and
within the context of the mystical body of Christ, they thought of this movement as properly individual, not collective or corporate. The mature Augustine
considered the earthly, institutional church to comprise a mixture of the good
and the wicked, those destined for heaven and those not. Furthermore, he held
that after the events recorded in the New Testament, we have no direct means
of seeing what God’s judgment of historical developments is. Augustine
believed that providence is at work in history, but just how it is working in this
or that case is almost always vague, opaque, and hard to discern. Because of
this, one cannot simply point to the outward success or geographical extent of
the church as an index of the progress of the faith. Sanctification is always a
matter of individual believers, not groups, collectives, or institutions. This is
why Augustine said that we make our times: “such as we are, such are the
times.” The condition of any age is the sum of individual movements toward
or away from God.
The idea of salvation history as the sum of individual spiritual histories is
at the heart of Olsen’s work on a theme closely related to reform in the per-
Olsen-010-Intro
26/08/2015
9:01 AM
Page 15
Introduction | 15
sonal, Augustinian sense, namely the history of individualism. Olsen has not
only commented on this problem over the years but in some ways helped to set
the terms of the discussion itself. He distinguishes simple awareness of internal
activity, whether intellectual or emotional, from a second-level reflection on
internal processes that have been seen as psychological universals, for example
“falling in love” or “ascending through the liberal arts to contemplation of
God.” These varieties of individualism are certainly relevant to the cultural
world of late antiquity and the high Middle Ages, but they fail to capture the
fuller development of individual self-awareness that occurs most famously but
not only in the case of Augustine. Spiritual reform of the sort Augustine pictured in his Confessions presupposes the existence of an individual person capable of and apt to be conscious of what Olsen called “the interior history of the
self” as distinct from other selves.12 This is not to say that awareness of one’s
own subjective psychological and spiritual development has always entailed the
delight in and celebration of individuality that we encounter in many modern
authors after the time of Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit (1811–1833). Indeed,
whether it is Augustine in the fifth century or Ignatius of Loyola in the sixteenth, the careful review of the history of the errors and sins that constitute
this individual is far from mere self-affirmation. For years Olsen has suggested
fruitful ways of investigating ancient and medieval sources for traces of this
mode of individualism.
These remarks about the idea of reform as a species of traditional renewal
ideology frame the third major section of the present collection. The studies
included in this section illustrate the general theme of reform and Christianity
in cases drawn from western European monastic sources of the central and high
Middle Ages, twelfth-century Burgundy, and late medieval Catalonia.
In “Spiritual Emptiness and Ascetic Exile in the Middle Ages” Giles Constable employs the idea of “emptiness” as a conceptual lens, as it were, with
which to view the monastic project of spiritual reform in the medieval west.
Always conscious of the origins of monasticism in the Egyptian desert and Syrian hinterland, western medieval ascetics accepted emptiness as a normative
concept of their vocation. Later monks and nuns assimilated themselves to the
pioneers of asceticism by moving to the desert or some other empty space.
Even in the earliest sources, however, this emptiness was usually not literal or
absolute; very often these places were not altogether uncultivated and not alto12
Glenn W. Olsen, “St. Augustine and the Problem of the Medieval Discovery of the
Individual,” Word and Spirit 9 (1987): 129–156, at 130.
Olsen-010-Intro
26/08/2015
9:01 AM
Page 16
16 | Introduction
gether devoid of signs of human habitation. Constable draws attention to the
importance of emptiness as a commonplace of monastic discourse, and notes
that the topos was used to describe a wide range of realities on the ground,
some of them not very empty at all.
The concern here is not so much to detect equivocation in the sources, but
to appreciate the polyvalent character of a series of reform ideas related to
emptiness. Constable examines a number of other illuminating dichotomies in
addition to that of topos and reality. Western medieval ascetics often enough
made or invented a desert, but they did not always call it peace. Sometimes the
empty place seemed beautiful, pristine, and even Edenic, resembling the locus
amoenus of pastoral song and evocative of the tradition of soft cultural primitivism. More often, however, the empty place was in fact inhabited by malevolent forces, evil spirits, and demons of the sort that Antony had struggled with
so long before. Although removed from the gaze of other human beings, this
desert was in fact an arena in which God and the heavenly host beheld the
ascetic’s single combat against temptation, sin, and the common enemy. The
paradoxical soft and hard cultural primitivism of this paradise battlefield was a
fitting venue for the ascetic’s negotiosissimum otium.
David Appleby and Teresa Olsen Pierre consider theological anthropology in relation to Christian reform in their study, “Upright Posture and Human
Dignity According to Bernard of Clairvaux.” Anthropology arises as an issue
of interest in relation to the idea of reform because in order to understand what
authors of a given period meant by Christian reform of the individual, one
must have a clear sense of what sort of thing they took the human person to be,
for it too has a history. Late antique and early medieval sources often say or
give the impression that the real human being is the thinking mind rather than
a body-soul composite. With its roots in the platonizing common culture of the
Hellenistic and Roman worlds, this perspective viewed man’s appetitive, affective, and erotic drives as only secondarily human, and downplayed human
embodiment itself. This idea appeared in various forms and with many different nuances, to the point of seeming incoherence. Even thinkers who repeated
the formula that the human person is a composite of soul and body were often
in practice keenly aware of the body as the source of temptation and weakness
– in effect, as the place of the soul’s penal confinement. Some parts of Scripture seemed to endorse a perspective on the body that was not merely cautious
but negative, and the same could be said of the ascetic regimen of the early
monastic movement. But Scripture also contained language and ideas that
would eventually facilitate a new view of human embodiment. In particular the
Olsen-010-Intro
26/08/2015
9:01 AM
Page 17
Introduction | 17
theme of the heart as the mysterious locus of man’s encounter with God was
conspicuous especially in Song of Songs and clearly had a resonance with commentators from Origen onwards. In the minds of some of these commentators, heart imagery in Scripture converged with the widely known Stoic philosophical doctrine of the human heart as the seat of the spark of the cosmic
Logos, or the divine fire residing within each human being. In other words,
alongside the hierarchical imagery of rational soul unhappily linked to material body there circulated a cardio-centric imagery in which mind and body
were simply different aspects of a unified whole. At times both of these
imageries were present in the works of the same author; for example, Augustine.
Bernard of Clairvaux’s thought illustrates the positive reassessment of the
body that took place within Christian anthropology just before the advent of
scholastic theology. As Olsen once suggested, even before the western reception of Aristotle’s hylomorphism in the thirteenth century, Bernard had started
to draw attention to the body as a source of possibility and positive spiritual
growth for human beings. In their study, Appleby and Pierre confirm that suggestion by considering Bernard’s reuse of the traditional idea that the upright
bodily stature and raised eyes signify human dignity. While Bernard’s early reference to the idea highlighted the body and eyes as signs of man’s present miserable condition, two later references present erect stature and raised eyes as a
lasting index of man’s created beauty and as permanent incentives to moral
improvement. Bernard went so far as to personify the body as Eve and to
emphasize its role as God-given helper to the soul, an idea he seems to have
developed in conjunction with his contemporary and friend, William of St.
Thierry.
Reform and anthropology are also the main concerns in Alberto Ferreiro’s
study, “‘A Little More than the Angels’: Anthropology and the Imitatio Christi
in a Catalán Sermon by Vicent Ferrer on Saint James the Greater.” Vicent was
a Dominican friar from Valencia who died in 1419 leaving many sermons in
Latin and a few in the vernacular. Ferreiro studies one of the Catalán sermons
on Saint James, the apostle who, according to medieval tradition, had preached
the Gospel in Spain and, after his martyrdom in Jerusalem (recorded in Acts
12:2), whose body had been carried to and interred in Galicia, at the site eventually known as Santiago de Compostela. Because a central theme of this sermon is the saint’s literal assimilation to Jesus, Ferreiro carefully situates Vicent’s
usage within the longer medieval history of imitatio Christi. Central here is the
gradual shift from a Christo-mimesis that concentrated on assimilation to the
Olsen-010-Intro
26/08/2015
9:01 AM
Page 18
18 | Introduction
divine nature, to one that took the human nature of Jesus as its object. Although
interest in the Lord’s humanity had been present since patristic times, in the
early Middle Ages the predominant approach was that of moral discipleship, the
experts at this being the saints who exhibited Christ-like virtues. Only in the
twelfth century and after did the emphasis shift to a more literal and corporal
emulation of Jesus’s life and deeds. Growing awareness of the full dimensions
of the Lord’s experience as man coincided with a new perspective in anthropology. The body came to be understood not only as the source of weakness
and temptation but as a possible manifestation of divinity if it could be brought
into consonance with the grace-filled human soul.
Preachers such as Vicent spread this high medieval understanding of imitatio Christi even outside learned circles. Relying upon Scripture and extra-biblical tradition, the sermon represents James as converting readily to a life of
good works, renouncing his own will in order more completely to become the
instrument of God’s will. Like Jesus James devoted himself to spreading word
of the new covenant and the kingdom of God, evangelizing Jews, competing
with magicians, and struggling against demons. And like Jesus James suffered
persecution and death for the sake of righteousness. An important new element in this sermon is Vicent’s awareness that the Immaculate Conception
should mean that Mary, like her son, is exalted above the angels in the eschatological hierarchy. Because his body came from hers, the fullness of perfection
requires that she be bodily present next to Christ in heaven. In turn, her glorification in heaven gives assurance that other human beings may be exalted above
the angels in the redemptive order. Although the doctrine of the Immaculate
Conception was not formally proclaimed by the Church until the nineteenth
century, Vicent’s sermon helps show how it grew out of twelfth-century developments in spirituality and how it came to be so widely known in the late Middle Ages.
Only in the modern period has some degree of escape from tradition
become possible for some individuals and groups. The collection’s final study
by Frank Coppa, “The Contessa di Castiglione: Patriot or Prostitute?” investigates one of the most intriguing but shadowy figures of the Risorgimento,
namely Virginia Oldoini, Countess of Castiglione (1837–1899). Although she
successfully refused to play the role that tradition assigned her, tradition exacted
revenge by obscuring her contribution to the foundation of the Italian state.
When in June 1859 the Franco-Sardinian army fought a decisive battle against
the Austrians, the allied commanders, Napoleon III and Victor Emmanuel II,
had something more in common than direction of the joint forces; they were
Olsen-010-Intro
26/08/2015
9:01 AM
Page 19
Introduction | 19
both on the most intimate terms with the charming and influential countess
of Castiglione. Discontent with the marriage her family had arranged for her,
and in any case motivated by interests more diplomatic than domestic, the
countess worked with her cousin, the Piedmontese Prime Minister Camillo di
Cavour, to gain an introduction to King Victor Emmanuel II. She accepted an
assignment to go to Paris with the aim of seducing Napoleon III and enlisting
him as an active champion of the Italian cause. In Paris she made good her
“Napoleonic conquest,” and became the object, variously, of opprobrium,
ridicule, admiration, and envy. The French did get involved on behalf of the
Italians against the Austrians, but the countess never attained the regular diplomatic post she had sought. Quite the reverse, in fact, for she found herself
shunned and neglected at home, and ultimately made her home in Paris for the
rest of her life.
Both in her lifetime and since her death the countess has suffered for her
non-conformity. Of course, her rejection of tradition was one element in the
personal charm and magnetism of which she made such effective use. Coppa
acknowledges this, but still considers her treatment by the custodians of historical memory to be disproportionate. During her lifetime, governments of
the right and left covered up the traces of her activity, destroying records and
downplaying the seriousness of her diplomatic and political activity. She has
had her biographers and mentions in the biographies of others, but these tend
to focus on the sensational, erotic, or romantic aspects of her story rather than
whatever serious diplomatic purposes and intentions of state she may have had.
Scandalous and exciting legend flourished in place of real historical insight. In
effect, there is a historiographical blind spot when it comes to a woman who,
in defiance of normal social roles, had a strong patriotic bent and who used the
means at her disposal to advance the common political cause. Coppa argues
that her story could not be told because it was so unconventional and so disquietingly female that it would have tarnished the image and narrative of the
great “makers” of modern Italy. At least in this case we see that even in the
modern period a clean and simple break from tradition seems unattainable.
Attunement to the irony implicit in the revenge tradition exacted upon
the non-traditional countess is itself a recent development. There is some truth
to Hayden White’s assertion that irony lies at the root of the modern historical consciousness, and the persistence of this sense of abridged expectation has
led many post-modern historians to concentrate on smaller and smaller questions with ever greater technical precision. Along with this shrinking horizon
has come a diminished confidence in historical thought’s value for life. Cer-
Olsen-010-Intro
26/08/2015
9:01 AM
Page 20
20 | Introduction
tainly Olsen’s acute sense of the discrepancy between ideal and reality, stated
norm and actual practice, attest to his awareness of irony in the history of western culture, whether ancient, medieval, or modern. But instead of narrowing
his scholarly perspective or confining him to a tacitly skeptical outlook, consciousness of the historian’s own historicity has inspired some of Olsen’s most
illuminating forays. His scholarship over the decades has shown by example
that the historical mode of thought is indispensable in the ongoing process of
understanding ourselves and our culture. In honor of Olsen’s many nuanced
and rich contributions to our understanding of the dynamic of medieval and
pre-modern western cultures, his students and friends have gathered these studies illustrating one of the central themes of Olsen’s scholarly work, namely the
continuous interpenetration between the present and the past.