Medieval Religious Rationalities by d'Avray

Author:d'Avray
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780511798276
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2011-04-30T16:00:00+00:00

Education

Systems of values and convictions may be reproduced and propagated in various ways. One of the commonest and most obvious is upbringing. People and peoples do not necessarily retain the convictions inculcated in childhood and youth, but often they do. Now this can be simply a matter of habit and tradition. Not necessarily, though: if the values in question form a coherent system and if they are passed on by parents and others with authentic certainty. When the older generation's views are hanging on somehow when their support has been shot away the new one abandons them easily; if different value systems are at war within the same society adolescents feel a strong sense of choice; but insofar as parents, teachers and mass media agree in presenting a coherent scheme of values and convictions and give some respectable reasons for them, a high proportion of their charges accept the basic package.

So far as the Middle Ages are concerned, the monastic practice of oblation of children9 must surely have played a large part in the formation of some key beliefs, including a vivid awareness of the Trinity. Oblation meant that boys grew up in monasteries from the age of about 7 or 8; it seems to have been the normal way to become a monk before the middle decades of the twelfth century, when the idea of monastic life as a choice made by young adults came in, with the help of a strong impulse from the Cistercians. The monastery would have been their social world. The idea of the Trinity was integrated into the collective prayer life of the monastery, and thus presumably impressed itself on the minds of some of the youths and boys who had joined the monastery as young ‘oblates’.10 The awareness would have been especially sharp where religious houses or their churches were dedicated to the Trinity: a growing practice in north and central France from the ninth to the eleventh century.11 There are other symptoms that devotion to the Trinity played a special role in the religious life of Benedictine monasteries in the tenth and eleventh centuries and that the feast of the Holy Trinity grew up in Benedictine monasteries in the eleventh century, when oblation of children was still the norm. Monasteries were like greenhouses where values and beliefs could grow strong.

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