Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres Part 28

Ainsi, considerant combien il y a d'apparence qu'il y a autre chose que ce que je vois, j'ai recherche si ce Dieu dont tout le monde parle n'aurait pas laisse quelques marques de lui. Je regarde de toutes parts et ne vois partout qu' obscuritd. La nature ne m'offre rien que ne soit matiere de doute et d'inquietude. Si je n'y voyais rien qui marquat une divinite, je me determinerais a n'en rien croire. Si je voyais partout les marques d'un Createur, je me reposerais en paix dans la foi. Mais voyant trop pour nier, et trop peu pour m'a.s.surer, je suis dans un etat a plaindre, et ou j'ai souhaite cent fois que si un Dieu soutient la nature, elle le marquat sans Equivoque; et que, si les marques qu'elle en donne sont trompeuses, elle les supprimat tout a fait; qu'elle dit tout ou rien, afin que je visse quel parti je dois suivre.

When I see the blindness and misery of man and the astonis.h.i.+ng contradictions revealed in his nature, and observe the whole universe mute, and man without light, abandoned to himself, as though lost in this corner of the universe, without knowing who put him here, or what he has come here to do, or what will become of him in dying, I feel fear like a man who has been carried when asleep into a desert and fearful island, and has waked without knowing where he is and without having means of rescue. And thereupon I wonder how man escapes despair at so miserable an estate. I see others about me, like myself, and I ask them if they are better informed than I, and they tell me no. And then these wretched wanderers, after looking about them and seeing some pleasant object, have given themselves up and attached themselves to it. As for me I cannot stop there, or rest in the company of these persons, wholly like myself, miserable like me, impotent like me. I see that they would not help me to die, I shall die alone, I must then act as though alone, but if I were alone I should not build houses, I should not fret myself with bustling occupations, I should seek the esteem of no one, but I should try only to discover the truth.

So, considering how much appearance there is that something exists other than what I see I have sought whether this G.o.d of Whom every one talks may not have left some marks of Himself. I search everywhere, and see only obscurity everywhere. Nature offers me nothing but matter of possible doubt and disquiet. If I saw there nothing to mark a divinity, I should make up my mind to believe nothing of it. If I saw everywhere the marks of a Creator, I should rest in peace in faith. But seeing too much to deny, and too little to affirm, I am in a pitiable state, where I have an hundred times wishes that, if a G.o.d supports nature, she would show it without equivocation; and that, if the marks she gives are deceptive, she would suppress them wholly; that she say all of nothing, that I may see my path.

This is the true Prometheus lyric, but when put back in its place it refuses to rest at Port-Royal which has a right to nothing but precision; it has but one real home--the Abbaye-de-Saint-Victor. The mind that recoils from itself can only commit a sort of ecstatic suicide; it must absorb itself in G.o.d; and in the bankruptcy of twelfth-century science the Western Christian seemed actually on the point of attainment; he, like Pascal, touched G.o.d behind the veil of scepticism.

The schools had already proved one or two points which need never have been discussed again. In essence, religion was love; in no case was it logic. Reason can reach nothing except through the senses; G.o.d, by essence, cannot be reached through the senses; if He is to be known at all, He must be known by contact of spirit with spirit, essence with essence; directly; by emotion; by ecstasy; by absorption of our existence in His; by subst.i.tution of his spirit for ours. The world had no need to wait five hundred years longer in order to hear this same result reaffirmed by Pascal. Saint Francis of a.s.sisi had affirmed it loudly enough, even if the voice of Saint Bernard had been less powerful than it was. The Virgin had a.s.serted it in tones more gentle, but any one may still see how convincing, who stops a moment to feel the emotion that lifted her wonderful Chartres spire up to G.o.d.

The Virgin, indeed, made all easy, for it was little enough she cared for reason or logic. She cared for her baby, a simple matter, which any woman could do and understand. That, and the grace of G.o.d, had made her Queen of Heaven. The Trinity had its source in her,-- totius Trinitatis n.o.bile Triclinium,--and she was maternity. She was also poetry and art. In the bankruptcy of reason, she alone was real.

So Guillaume de Champeaux, half a century dead, came to life again in another of his creations. His own Abbey of Saint-Victor, where Abelard had carried on imaginary disputes with him, became the dominant school. As far as concerns its logic, we had best pa.s.s it by. The Victorians needed logic only to drive away logicians, which was hardly necessary after Bernard had shut up the schools. As for its mysticism, all training is much alike in idea, whether one follows the six degrees of contemplation taught by Richard of Saint- Victor, or the eightfold n.o.ble way taught by Gautama Buddha. The theology of the school was still less important, for the Victorians contented themselves with orthodoxy only in the sense of caring as little for dogma as for dialectics; their thoughts were fixed on higher emotions. Not Richard the teacher, but Adam the poet, represents the school to us, and when Adam dealt with dogma he frankly admitted his ignorance and hinted his indifference; he was, as always, conscientious; but he was not always, or often, as cold.

His statement of the Trinity is a marvel; but two verses of it are enough:--

Digne loqui de personis Vim transcendit rationis, Excedit ingenia.

Quid sit gigni, quid processus, Me nescire sum professus, Sed fide non dubia.

Qui sic credit, non festinet, Et a via non declinet Insolenter regia.

Servet fidem, formet mores, Nec attendat ad errors Quos d.a.m.nat Ecclesia.

Of the Trinity to reason Leads to license or to treason Punishment deserving.

What is birth and what procession Is not mine to make profession, Save with faith unswerving.

Thus professing, thus believing, Never insolently leaving The highway of our faith, Duty weighing, law obeying, Never shall we wander straying Where heresy is death.

Such a school took natural refuge in the Holy Ghost and the Virgin, --Grace and Love,--but the Holy Ghost, as usual, profited by it much less than the Virgin. Comparatively little of Adam's poetry is expressly given to the Saint Esprit, and too large a part of this has a certain flavour of dogma:--

Qui procedis ab utroque Genitore Genitoque Pariter, Parac.l.i.te!

. . . . . . . . . Amor Patris, Filiique Par amborum et utrique Compar et consimilis!

The Holy Ghost is of the Father and of the Son; neither made nor created nor begotten, but proceeding.

The whole three Persons are coeternal together; and coequal.

This sounds like a mere versification of the Creed, yet when Adam ceased to be dogmatic and broke into true prayer, his verse added a lofty beauty even to the Holy Ghost; a beauty too serious for modern rhyme:--

Oh, juvamen oppressorum, Oh, solamen miserorum, Pauperum refugium, Da contemptum terrenorum!

Ad amorem supernorum Trahe desiderium!

Consolator et fundator, Habitator et amator, Cordium humilium, Pelle mala, terge sordes, Et discordes fac Concordes, Et affer praesidium!

Oh, helper of the heavy-laden, Oh, solace of the miserable, Of the poor, the refuge, Give contempt of earthly pleasures!

To the love of heavenly treasures Lift our hearts' desire!

Consolation and foundation, Dearest friend and habitation Of the lowly-hearted, Dispel our evil, cleanse our foulness, And our discords turn to concord, And bring us succour!

Adam's scholasticism was the most sympathetic form of mediaeval philosophy. Even in prose, the greatest writers have not often succeeded in stating simply and clearly the fact that infinity can make itself finite, or that s.p.a.ce can make itself bounds, or that eternity can generate time. In verse, Adam did it as easily as though he were writing any other miracle,--as Gaultier de Coincy told the Virgin's,--and any one who thinks that the task was as easy as it seems, has only to try it and see whether he can render into a modern tongue any single word which shall retain the whole value of the word which Adam has chosen:--

Ne periret h.o.m.o reus Redemptorem misit Deus, Pater unigenitum; Visitavit quos amavit Nosque vitae revocavit Gratia non meritum.

Infinitus et Immensus, Quem non capit ullus sensus Nec locorum spatia, Ex eterno temporalis, Ex immenso fit localis, Ut restauret omnia.

To death condemned by awful sentence, G.o.d recalled us to repentance, Sending His only Son; Whom He loved He came to cherish; Whom His justice doomed to perish, By grace to life he won.

Infinity, Immensity, Whom no human eye can see Or human thought contain, Made of infinity a s.p.a.ce, Made of Immensity a place, To win us Life again.

The English verses, compared with the Latin, are poor enough, with the canting jingle of a cheap religion and a thin philosophy, but by contrast and comparison they give higher value to the Latin. One feels the dignity and religious quality of Adam's chants the better for trying to give them an equivalent. One would not care to hazard such experiments on poetry of the highest cla.s.s like that of Dante and Petrarch, but Adam was conventional both in verse and thought, and aimed at obtaining his effects from the skilful use of the Latin sonorities for the purposes of the chant. With dogma and metaphysics he dealt boldly and even baldly as he was required to do, and successfully as far as concerned the ear or the voice; but poetry was hardly made for dogma; even the Trinity was better expressed mathematically than by rhythm. With the stronger emotions, such as terror, Adam was still conventional, and showed that he thought of the chant more than of the feeling and exaggerated the sound beyond the value of the sense. He could never have written the "Dies Irae."

He described the s.h.i.+pwreck of the soul in magnificent sounds without rousing an emotion of fear; the raging waves and winds that swept his bark past the abysses and up to the sky were as conventional as the sirens, the dragons, the dogs, and the pirates that lay in wait.

The mast nodded as usual; the sails were rent; the sailors ceased work; all the machinery was cla.s.sical; only the prayer to the Virgin saved the poetry from sinking like the s.h.i.+p; and yet, when chanted, the effect was much too fine to bear translation:--

Ave, Virgo singularis, Mater nostri Salutaris, Quae vocaris Stella Maris, Stella non erratica; Nos in hujus vitae mari Non permitte naufragari, Sed pro n.o.bis Salutari Tuo semper supplica!

Saevit mare, fremunt venti, Fluctus surgunt turbulenti; Navis currit, sed currenti Tot occurrunt obvia!

Hic sirenes voluptatis, Draco, canes c.u.m piratis, Mortem pene desperatis Haec intentant omnia.

Post abyssos, nunc ad coelum Furens unda fert phaselum; Nutat malus, fluit velum, Nautae cessat opera; Contabescit in his malis h.o.m.o noster animalis; Tu nos, Mater spiritalis, Pereuntes liberal!

Finer still is the famous stanza sung at Easter, in which Christ rises, the Lion of Judah, in the crash of the burst gates of death, at the roar of the Father Lion:--

Sic de Juda, leo fortis, Fractis portis dirae mortis, Die surgens tertia, Rugiente voce patris Ad supernae sinum matris Tot revexit spolia.

For terror or ferocity or images of pain, the art of the twelfth century had no use except to give a higher value to their images of love. The figures on the west portal of Chartres are alive with the spirit of Adam's poetry, but it is the spirit of the Virgin. Like Saint Bernard, Adam lavished his affections on Mary, and even more than Saint Bernard he could claim to be her poet-laureate. Bernard was not himself author of the hymn "Stella Maris" which brought him the honour of the Virgin's personal recognition, but Adam was author of a dozen hymns in which her perfections were told with equal fervour, and which were sung at her festivals. Among these was the famous

Salve, Mater Pietatis, Et totius Trinitatis n.o.bile Triclinium!

a compliment so refined and yet so excessive that the Venerable Thomas Cantimpratensis who died a century later, about 1280, related in his "Apiarium" that when "venerabilis Adam" wrote down these lines, Mary herself appeared to him and bent her head in recognition. Although the ma.n.u.scripts do not expressly mention this miracle, they do contain, at that stanza, a curious note expressing an opinion, apparently authorized by the prior, that, if the Virgin had seen fit to recognize the salutation of the Venerable Adam in this manner, she would have done only what he merited: "ab ea resalutari et regratiari meruit."

Adam's poems are still on the shelves of most Parisian bookshops, as common as "Auca.s.sins" and better known than much poetry of our own time; for the mediaeval Latin rhymes have a delightful sonority and simplicity that keep them popular because they were not made to be read but to be sung. One does not forget their swing:--