The Waning of the Middle Ages by Johan Huizinga

Author:Johan Huizinga [Johan Huizinga]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2016-01-29T05:00:00+00:00

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1 Let us pray God that the Jacobins May eat the Augustinians, And that the Carmelites may be hanged With the cords of the Minorites.

2 Perhaps the king wrote by mistake, pastenargues for pastèques = watermelons.

3 He who reads Denis reads everything.

4 I am now going to enter the haven of secure taciturnity.

CHAPTER XIV

RELIGIOUS SENSIBILITY AND RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION

Ever since the gentle mysticism of Saint Bernard, in the twelfth century, had started the strain of pathetic tenderness about the Passion of Christ, the religious sensibility of the medieval soul had been increasing. The mind was saturated with the concepts of Christ and the cross. In early childhood the image of the cross was implanted on the sensitive heart, so grand and forbidding as to overshadow all other affections by its gloom. When Jean Gerson was a child, his father one day stood with his back against a wall, his arms outspread, saying: “Thus, child, was your God crucified, who made and saved you.” This image of his father, he tells us, remained engraved on his mind, expanding as he grew older, even in his old age, and he blessed his pious father for it, who had died on the day of the Exaltation of the Cross. Saint Colette, when four years old, every day heard her mother in prayer lament and weep about the Passion, sharing the pain of contumely, blows, and torments. This recollection fixed itself in the supersensitive heart of Colette with such intensity, that she felt, all her life through, the most severe oppression of heart every day at the hour of the crucifixion; and at the reading of the Passion she suffered more than a woman in childbed.

A preacher sometimes paused to stand in silence, with his arms extended in the form of the cross, for a quarter of an hour.

The soul is so imbued with the conception of the Passion that the most remote analogy suffices to make the chord of the memory of Christ vibrate. A poor nun carrying wood to the kitchen imagines she carries the cross; a blind woman doing the washing takes the tub for the manger and the washhouse for the stable.

This extreme religious sensibility shows itself by copious weeping. Devotion, says Denis the Carthusian, is a sort of tenderness of heart, which easily moves to tears of piety. We should pray God to have “the daily baptism of tears.” They are the wings of prayer and, according to Saint Bernard, the wine of angels. We should give ourselves up to the grace of meritorious tears, get ready for them and let ourselves be carried away by them all the year round, but especially during Lent, so that we may say with the psalmist: Fuerunt mihi lacrimae meae panis die ac nocte.1 Sometimes they come so easily, that we pray sobbing and groaning. If they do not come, we should not force them; we should then content ourselves with the tears of the heart. In the presence of others we should avoid these signs of extraordinary devotion.

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