Meet Guibert de Nogent (1053 – 1125), the abbot of a
monastery in Picardy, northern France. Guibert’s seventy years of life
coincided with some pretty tumultuous and exciting events – the Norman Conquest
of England, the ideological struggle between the German emperors and the popes
that is somewhat misleadingly called the Investiture Controversy (the right to invest
bishops was part of it, but far from the whole story), the First Crusade, the
explosion of new monastic movements like the Carthusians and Cistercians, a
campaign across the whole of Catholic Christendom to reform clerical morality
and the emergence of urban self-government in the West for the first time since
classical antiquity.
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| A self-portrait of Guibert de Nogent from his Tropologies of the Prophets shows Guibert (in his black Benedictine robes) offering his book up to Christ enthroned, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Lat 2502, folio 1 |
Guibert had opinions
on all of these things going on in the world, despite never leaving his corner
of northeast-France save for one brief trip to Burgundy, as is attested in his
writings, even if some of them are written from a quite parochial angle. He
wrote a treatise on saints and relics, a history of the First Crusade called The
Deeds of God through the Franks and an autobiography called the Monodies,
which includes within it a history of his abbey of Nogent-sous-Coucy and an
account of the bloody uprising of the citizens of Laon against their bishop in
1112 which resulted in a short-lived urban republic called the Laon commune.
Guibert is quite a household name among crusades historians, but arguably he’s
most significant as the author of the Monodies, written between 1108 and
1115. Guibert called them the Monodies (Latin: Monodiae) because
that term meant a song sung by one person. As Isidore of Seville (560 – 636)
explained in his early seventh century encyclopaedia Etymologies:
Original Latin: Cum autem unus canit, Graece monodia, Latine
sincinnium dicitur; cum vero duo canunt, bicinium appellatur: cum multi,
chorus.
My translation: When one person sings, while in Greek it is
said to be a monodia, in Latin it is said to be a sincinnium; indeed,
when two people sing, they call it bicinium, and when many people sing,
they call it a chorus.
The Monodies were the first complete autobiography to
have been written in the West since St Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions (c.400).
Indeed, it is the shadow of St Augustine that lurks behind Guibert de Nogent’s
work. Like St Augustine, who was hugely influential, Guibert believed that the
human mind and soul were locked in a constant struggle against their own pride
and the various corrupting forces present in the material world and this is the
central theme that runs throughout his autobiography. He also believed that
demons could assist in leading humans down the path of pride, temptation and
corruption, and this will essentially be the focus of this series. And like
Augustine in the Confessions, Guibert’s story is that of a boy who
starts out with promise, goes down the path of sin in adolescence but later
relents thanks to God’s boundless compassion and patience – indeed, both
deliberately echo the story of the Prodigal Son in the Gospel of Luke.
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| St Augustine of Hippo (354 - 431): Guibert de Nogent's personal hero and inspiration |
One could also say that Guibert was to some degree writing
in an established genre of religious writing, one which revolved around using
“experiences (experimenta)” as “examples (exempla)” to teach good
or bad morals. Many monks had written works in this vein, which could get quite
intimate and personal, such as Otloh of St Emmeram (1010 – 1072) in his letter
to his friend, William of Hirsau. Indeed, beyond Guibert’s youth, his
autobiography essentially reads like a collection of anecdotes with moral
lessons, in many of which Guibert himself is just a side-character.
Nonetheless, while this is a carefully curated
autobiography, Guibert de Nogent as a teenager had been taught by Anslem of
Bec, the great theologian and future archbishop of Canterbury, and had fully
internalised his trademark saying “If I look within myself, I cannot bear
myself; if I do not look within myself, I do not know myself.” Also, if this
was all just a moralistic exercise, or a story of faith and devotion to God
being tested, why did Guibert focus on himself? Surely, he could have just
focused on Bible stories for his experimenta, as Otloh had done, or the
lives of the saints in providing instruction on how to live a good life and
avoid evil, as these were more than sufficient for that purpose. There’s little
doubt that Guibert saw himself as a unique somebody with distinctly personal
challenges to overcome as well as ones that spoke to the experiences of your
regular medieval monk. But note that he did not see himself as a unique
somebody in a positive, celebratory way. This was a man who never learned to be
happy with himself, and while a moderate amount of self-deprecation was de
rigueur for a medieval monk or cleric (there’s plenty of that in the writings
of Guibert’s mentor, St Anselm of Canterbury) Guibert takes it to excessive
levels in the Monodies. Yet despite his crippling insecurities and
anxieties was able to accomplish all that could have been expected of him and
more in life and was not driven to depression and suicide.
Now, to get a sense of the general tone of the text, lets
see first how Guibert begins his autobiography:
I confess to your majesty, O God, the innumerable times I
have strayed from your paths, and the innumerable times you inspired me to
return to you. I confess the iniquity of my childhood and my youth, still
boiling within me as an adult. I confess my deep-seated penchant for depravity,
which has not ceased in spite of my declining strength. Lord, every time I
recall my persistence in self-defilement and remember how you have always given
me the means of regretting it, I can only marvel at your infinite patience. It
truly defies the imagination. If repentance and the urge to pray never occur
without the outpouring of your spirit, how do you manage to fill the hearts of
sinners so liberally and grant so many graces to those who have turned from you
and who even provoked you?
Now, in a sense, Guibert is following St Augustine’s Confessions,
by giving a meditation on the nature of God and his relationships with humans. His
theological training from St Anselm of Canterbury is also much in evidence here
– two of St Anselm’s great specialisms were in ontology (the study of the
nature of God as a cosmic being) and moral theology or, in GCSE RS/ A Level
Philosophy terms, “the problem of evil” (why does God allow bad things to
happen in the natural world and humans to sin). But even if a lot of the
language, very eloquent nonetheless, is quite generic, Guibert unlike Augustine
in the first five chapters of the Confessions, makes it explicit that this isn’t
about God and man generally, its about God and him. Right from the start,
Guibert is making it clear that this is about him as a unique somebody, and a
uniquely wretched and sinful somebody, who God with his infinite power and
goodness somehow manages to redeem. To while Guibert is undoubtedly taking his
lead from one of the greatest of the Church Fathers of ancient Christianity,
and one of the most prominent Catholic theologians of his own day, he is from
the start writing something original.
Later on in the first chapter, Guibert says:
O good God, when I come back to you after my binges of
inner drunkenness, I don’t turn back from knowledge of myself, even though I
don’t otherwise make any progress either. If I am blind in knowing myself, how could
I possibly have any spark of knowledge for you? If, as Jeremiah says, “I am the
man who has seen affliction” [Lamentations 3:1], it follows that I must look
very carefully for the things that compensate for that poverty. To put that
differently, if I don’t know what is good, how am I to know what is bad, let
alone hateful? Unless I know what beauty is I can never loathe what is ugly. It
follows from this that I try to know you insofar as I can know myself; and
enjoying the knowledge of you does not mean that I lack self-knowledge. It is a
good thing, then, and singularly beneficial for my soul, that confessions of
this sort allow my persistent search for your light to dispel the darkness of
my reason. With steady lighting my reason will no longer be in the dark about
itself.
This beautifully written passage neatly expresses Guibert’s
purpose in writing the book – to try and understand himself in order to be able
to understand God. Right from the outset this is a deeply religious exercise,
but Guibert doesn’t want a generic understanding of what God is like and what
he does? He wants to understand him through his own personal experiences.
In the second chapter, Guibert goes on to think about the gifts
God has given him in life. This is echoing St Augustine, who in Confessions 9.6
says:
Original Latin: Munera tua tibi confiteor, domine deus
meus, creator omnium et multum potens formare nostra deformia.
My translation (bit ropey, but here goes): I demonstrate
many of your gifts to me to you, my lord God, creator of all and with much power
to shape our many deformities.
Here, Guibert remarks that all the things we have materially
in life are gifts from God and thus we shouldn’t boast of them because whatever
they might do for us in this world, they’ll do nothing for us in the next:
The more fleeting they are, the more their very
transitoriness makes them suspect. If one can find no other argument to despise
them, it is enough to point out that one’s genealogy, or physical appearance,
are not of one’s choosing.
Some things can sometimes be acquired through effort:
wealth, for example, or talent … But the truth of my assertion here is only
relative. If the light, which “enlightens the way for every man coming into the
world” [John 1.9] fails to enlighten reason – and if Christ, the key to all
science, fails to open the doors of right doctrine – then, surely, teachers are
fighting a losing battle against clogged ears. Any person, then, is unwise to
lay claim to anything except sin. But let me drop this and get on with my subject.
Guibert then goes on name the first and foremost of those
gifts God has given him, namely his mother “who is beautiful yet chaste and
modest and filled with the fear of the Lord”, which nicely summarises Guibert’s
view of what womanhood should be (he most certainly wasn’t alone in it!).
Guibert’s mother is a very important recurring character in the Monodies,
as we’ll see, and it is she who plays the most important role, after God of
course, in steering him down the right path and away from sin and ruin. It becomes
quite clear from the Monodies that Guibert was very close to his mother
(even after he become a cloistered novice monk, she lived as a hermit in the
monastery grounds and he would visit her), and that she had a very important
influence on his personality, both positive and negative. It was no doubt his recollections
of his mother that led to Guibert identifying a lot with St Augustine, who also
had a mother (Monica) who was devout and modest, whom he was very fond of and
who did a lot to try and steer him down the right path, in Augustine’s case
towards Christianity (Augustine’s father was a pagan and in youth Augustine became
firstly a Manichaean and then a Neoplatonist sceptic).
Guibert uses his mother to illustrate the points he’s just
made earlier:
Mentioning her beauty alone would have been profane and
foolish if I didn’t add (to show the vanity of the word “beauty), that the
severity of her look was sure proof of her chastity. For poverty-ridden people,
who have no choice about their food, fasting is really a form of torture and is
therefore less praiseworthy; whereas if rich people abstain from food, their
merit is derived from its abundance. So it is with beauty, which is all the
more praiseworthy if it resists flattery while knowing itself to be desirable.
Sallust was able to consider beauty praiseworthy
independent of moral considerations. Otherwise, he would have never said about
Aurelia Orestilla that “good men never praised anything in her except her beauty.
Sallust seems to have meant that Aurelia’s beauty, considered in isolation,
could still be praised by good people, while admitting how corrupt she was in
everything else. Speaking for Sallust, I think he might as well have said that
Aurelia deserved to be praised for a natural God-given gift, defiled though she
was by the other impurities that made up her being. Likewise, a statue can be
praised for the harmony of its parts, no matter what material it is made of. Saint
Paul may call an idol “unreal” from the point of view of faith, and indeed
nothing is more profane than an idol, but one can still admire the harmony of
its limbs …
… If everything that has been designed in the eternal
plan of God is good, every particular instance of beauty in the temporal order
is, one might say, a mirror of that eternal beauty. It is created things that
make the eternal things of God intelligible,” [Romans 1:20] says Saint Paul …
In his book entitled On Christian Doctrine (If I am not
mistaken) Saint Augustine wrote something like this: “a person with a beautiful
body and a corrupt soul is to be more pitied than one whose body is also ugly.”
If therefore we lament beauty that is blemished, it is unquestionably a good
thing when beauty, though depraved, is improved through perseverance in
goodness.
Thank you God, for instilling virtue in my mother’s
beauty. The seriousness of her whole bearing was enough to show her contempt
for all vanity. A sober look, measured words, modest facial expressions hardly
lend encouragement to the gaze of would-be suitors. O God of power, you know what
fame your name had inspired in her from earliest years, and how she rebelled
against every form of allurement. Incidentally, one rarely, if ever, finds
comparable self-control among women of her social rank, or a comparable
reluctance to denigrate those who lack self-control. Whenever anyone, whether
from within our outside her household, began this sort of gossip, she would
turn away and go, looking as irritated as if she were the one being attacked.
What compels me to relate these facts, O God of truth, is not a private affection,
even for my mother, but the facts themselves, which are far more eloquent than
my words could ever be. Besides, the rest of my family are fierce, brutish
warriors and murderers. They have no idea of God and would surely live far from
your sight unless you were willing to show them your boundless mercy as you so
often do.
"Fierce and brutish warriors and murderers" with "no idea of God": knights torment the Roman philosopher and statesman Boethius in this highly imaginative eleventh century manuscript of the Consolations of Philosophy from France, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Latin 6401
There’s so much to talk about here. The first is Guibert’s
methods of argumentation. He always starts from his own personal reflections on
human character, which he seems to have a keen awareness of, or on God and then
elaborates on them with references to revered authorities – a standard method
of argumentation throughout Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance,
given how much tradition and ancient wisdom was valued in premodern thought. Most
of the intellectual authorities Guibert cites are the Biblical, or else St
Augustine, though notably he does cite the first century BC Roman historian Sallust,
specifically his discussion of Aurelia Orestilla, the wife of the wicked
Catiline, the Roman aristocrat who attempted to overthrow the Republic in 63
BC, in his On the Conspiracy of Catiline. We might assume, based on our preconceived
modern stereotypes, that a devout medieval monk would be hysterically opposed
to pagan literature, but as I’ve written before such stereotypes are largely
unwarranted. Instead, the pagan Romans were regarded by most medieval intellectuals
as the best guide to skilled rhetoric and fine writing, and as deeply insightful
if sometimes flawed guides to the natural world, the human condition and history.
Sallust himself was a standard classroom text in medieval monasteries and
cathedral schools, and so many medieval historians roughly contemporary to Guibert
including William of Poitiers, Bruno of Merseburg, Orderic Vitalis, William of
Malmsbury and Henry of Huntingdon were intimately familiar with both his Catilinarian
Conspiracy and his Jugurthine War. In citing Sallust, Guibert was
both showing that the ancients had made the similar observations on human
character to him, despite their differing religious worldviews, as well as also
demonstrating that he was a well-educated man.
We can also see that Guibert wasn’t dogmatic in how he chose
to follow authorities. While he agrees with Saint Paul that idols, by which he
means physical objects that are worshipped by people presuming them to be
living, physical manifestations of deities, are bad, he also says that they can
nonetheless be pleasing to look at from an aesthetic standpoint. This also reflects
part of his personality – as I’ll show you in a future post, Guibert did have something
of a proto-archaeological interest in pagan antiquities, and even excavated a more
than one thousand-year-old holy-site in the grounds of his monastery.
The final lines concerning his mother in this chapter really
give us a sense of why Guibert wrote the Monodies. These “facts” about his
life do more than any abstract theological reasoning or fine rhetoric could do
to illustrate his arguments, by showing how it all works out in the here and
now.
Guibert also has a very negative attitude towards his own
family background and social class. As we’ll see, both his parents came from
the lowest echelons of the Northern French warrior aristocracy – his mother was
a minor noblewoman and his father a knight who owned his own castle. While
undoubtedly this background helped Guibert get to where he was, as abbot of Nogent,
Guibert sees it as nothing praiseworthy and disdains what he sees as the highly
secular, materialistic and violent culture of this social group. Guibert was not
alone here. St Bernard of Clairvaux, the great Cistercian abbot and the most
influential religious leader of the twelfth century, was full of denunciations
of the vanity, vainglory, lustfulness and violence of nobles and knights – in
1115, a year after Guibert finished the Monodies, Bernard condemned the
new craze for mock battles among young knights that were coming to be known as
tournaments. And Guibert’s contemporaries, Orderic Vitalis and Abbot Suger, wrote
invective-laden narratives about borderline psychopathic feudal lords who
habitually terrorised churches and kidnapped and tortured merchants, men like
Robert de Belleme and Thomas de Marle (who also appears in Guibert’s Monodies).
At the same time, Guibert is a helpful reminder that churchmen and warrior aristocrats
weren’t from two different worlds – a lot of the time, they were brothers,
uncles, nephews and cousins! And the First Crusade gave Guibert a flicker of
optimism for the warrior elite, while his contemporary St Bernard of Clairvaux
tried to spiritually reform them and channel their martial energies to higher causes
by setting up the Knights Templar with Hugh de Payens between 1118 and 1127.
Finally, Guibert gives us such a brilliant insight into the
ascetic mindset, which can be really hard to grasp in twenty-first century
Britain where the idea of going off to live in a monastery, giving up all
personal property, abstaining from sex and living a life of prayer, hard work,
study, contemplation and fasting to get closer to a divine being seems very
alien and transgressive to most people. Particularly revealing is that paragraph
about poor people fasting as opposed to rich people fasting, the latter
deserving more praise than the former for doing so. A recurring theme
throughout many medieval hagiographies is the wealth, noble pedigree and
physical attractiveness of the saints (male and female) that are their subject
matter being stressed – the point being that they could enjoy political power,
luxurious living and sexual pleasure, yet they chose to spurn it all to pursue
a higher cause. Perhaps then the closest analogues to medieval ascetic saints
and monks today would be certain members of the environmental movement, like
Greta Thunberg.
