Mimesis (29 page)

(Humility is the mistress of the virtues, the excellent daughter of the highest King, descending from the highest heaven with the Lord of the heavens. … It is humility alone which makes the virtues blessed and everlasting, which forces the kingdom of heaven, which humbled the Lord of Majesty unto death, even the death of the cross. For that the Word of God, dwelling in the Sublime, should descend to us, was first prompted by humility.)

In his sermons too the antithesis
humilitas-sublimitas
appears time and again: both in reference to Christ’s Incarnation, when he exclaims, prompted by Luke 3: 23, “being (as was supposed) the son of Joseph,”
O humilitas virtus Christi! o humilitatis sublimitas! quantum confundis superbiam nostrae vanitatis!
(
In epiph. Domini sermo
, 1, 7; Pat. Lat. 183, 146), as also in regard to the Passion and Christ’s mission in general, considered as an object of emulation:
Propterea, dilectissimi, perseverate in disciplina quam suscepistis, ut per humilitatem ad sublimitatem ascendatis, quia haec est via et non est alia praeter ipsam. Qui aliter vadit, cadit potius quam ascendit, quia sola est humilitas quae exaltat, sola quae ducit ad vitam. Christus enim, cum per naturam divinitatis non haberet quo cresceret vel ascenderet, quia ultra deum nihil est, per descensum quomodo cresceret invenit, veniens incarnari, pati, mori, ne moreremur in aeternum
. … (
In ascens. Dom
. 2, 6; Pat. Lat. 183, 304.)

(Therefore, dearly beloved, persevere in the discipline which you have taken upon you, so that by humility you may ascend to sublimity, for this is the way and there is none other. Who walks otherwise falls rather than rises, for it is humility alone which exalts, humility alone which leads to life. For Christ, having, by his divine nature, nowhither to grow or to ascend, because beyond God there is nothing, found by descending a way to grow, coming to be made flesh, to suffer, to die, that we should not die in eternity. …)

But the most beautiful passage of this kind—and at the same time one that is most characteristic of the style of Bernard the mystic—may well
be the following, from his commentary on the Song of Songs:
O humilitas, o sublimitas! Et tabernaculum Cedar
(Cant. 1: 5),
et sanctuarium Dei; et terrenum habitaculum, et coeleste palatium; et domus lutea, et aula regia; et corpus mortis, et templum lucis; et despectio denique superbis, et sponsa Christi
. Nigra est, sed formosa, filiae Jerusalem (Cant. 1: 5-6):
quam etsi labor et dolor longi exilii decolorat, species tamen coelestis exornat, exornant pelles Salomonis
(Cant. 1: 5).
Si horretis nigram, miremini et formosam; si despicitis humilem, sublimem suspicite. Hoc ipsum quam cautum, quam plenum consilii, plenum discretionis et congruentiae est, quod in sponsa dejectio ista, et ista celsitudo secundum tempus quidem eo moderamine sibi pariter contemperantur, ut inter mundi huius varietates et sublimitas erigat humilem, ne deficiat in adversis; et sublimem humilitas reprimat, ne evanescat in prosperis? Pulchre omnino ambae res, cum ad invicem contrariae sint, sponsae tamen pariter cooperantur in bonum, subserviunt in salutem
.

(O humility, O sublimity! [Thou art] the tents of Kedar, and the sanctuary of God; an earthly habitation, and a heavenly palace; a house of clay, and a kingly court; a body of death, and a temple of light; lastly, a scorn to the proud, and the bride of Christ.
She is black but comely, O daughters of Jerusalem
: though the toil and pain of a long exile discolor her, yet a heavenly beauty adorns her, the curtains of Solomon adorn her. If you shudder at her blackness, admire too her beauty; if you despise her humbleness, behold her sublimity. How provident it is, how full of discretion and congruence, that this very degradation and this very exaltation of the bride compensate each other in this temporal world, so that amid its many changes sublimity raises up the humble man so that he does not fail in adversity, and humility restrains the proud man so that he does not grow vain in prosperity! Most beautiful, then, are they both, forasmuch as, though they are contraries, they work together alike for the good of the bride and serve her salvation.)

These significant passages are concerned with the thing itself, not with its literary treatment.
Sublimitas
and
humilitas
are here wholly ethico-theological categories, not aesthetico-stylistic ones. Yet in this latter sense too, that is in terms of style, the antithetical fusion of the two was emphasized, so early as the patristic period, as a characteristic of Holy Scripture—especially by Augustine (see above, pp. 72f.). The
point of departure was the Scripture text that God had hidden these things from the wise and prudent and revealed them unto babes (Matt. 11: 25; Luke 10: 21), as well as the fact that Christ had chosen fishermen and publicans and such humble people as his first disciples (see also I Cor. 1: 26ff.) rather than men of rank or learning. But the question of style became really acute when the spread of Christianity exposed Holy Scripture, and Christian literature in general, to the aesthetic criticism of highly educated pagans. They were horrified at the claim that the highest truths were contained in writings composed in a language to their minds impossibly uncivilized and in total ignorance of the stylistic categories. This criticism did not go unheeded, and the Fathers were generally far more concerned with the traditional standards of classical style than were the earliest Christian documents. But the same criticism also opened their eyes to the true and distinctive greatness of Holy Scripture—namely, that it had created an entirely new kind of sublimity, in which the everyday and the low were included, not excluded, so that, in style as in content, it directly connected the lowest with the highest. With this yet another train of thought was associated, based on the occult character of many passages in the Bible and the great difficulty in interpreting them: while on the one hand Scripture speaks very simply, as if to children, on the other hand it contains secrets and riddles which are revealed to very few; but even these passages are not written in a pretentious and erudite style, so that they can be understood only by the highly educated, proud in their knowledge, they can be understood by all who are humble and filled with faith. Augustine—who described his own advance to a comprehension of Holy Scripture in his
Confessions
(especially 3, 5 and 6, 5)—expresses this in a letter to Volusianus (137, 18) in the following terms:
ea vero quae
(
sacra scriptura
)
in mysteriis occultat, nec ipsa eloquio superbo erigit, quo non audeat accedere mens tardiuscula et inerudita quasi pauper ad divitem; sed invitat omnes humili sermone, quos non solum manifesta pascat, sed etiam secreta exerceat veritate, hoc in promptis quod in reconditis habens
. Or in the first chapter of
De trinitate: Sacra scriptura parvulis congruens nullius generis rerum verba vitavit
[clearly an allusion to the antique separation of styles],
ex quibus quasi gradatim ad divina atque sublimia noster intellectus velut nutritus assurgeret
. Among the numerous similar passages in Augustine which vary this theme in many ways, I will mention one more, because it describes the type of comprehension which is open to the humble and simple. It occurs in the
Enarrationes in Psalmos
and refers to the words,
suscipiens mansuetos Dominus
, in Psalm 146:
Conticescant humanae voces, requiescant humanae cogitationes; ad incomprehensibilia non se extendant quasi comprehensuri, sed tamquam participaturi
—a passage in which we see a most beautiful fusion of mystic elements and the concretely sensuous desire to share in possession (in opposition, of course, to the “proud” intellectual arrogance of those who insist on understanding). Peter Lombard, the
Magister sententiarum
, virtually copied the passage in his commentary on the Psalms, composed about the middle of the twelfth century. And the complete transformation into mysticism is to be found in Bernard, who bases comprehension entirely upon meditation on Christ’s life and Passion:
Beati qui noverunt gustu felicis experientiae, quam dulciter, quam mirabiliter in oratione et meditatione scripturas dignetur Dominus revelare
(
in feria
2
Paschatis sermo
, 20).

Several thoughts in complex interdependence are expressed in these passages: that Holy Scripture favors those whose hearts are simple and filled with faith; that such a heart is a prerequisite to “sharing” in it, for sharing and not a purely rational understanding is what it seeks to offer; that the occult and obscure elements it contains are likewise not couched in an “elevated style” (
eloquio superbo
) but in simple words, so that anyone can ascend
quasi gradatim
from the simple to the sublime and divine, or, as Augustine puts it in the
Confessions
, that one must read it as a child would:
verum tamen illa erat, quae cresceret cum parvulis
. And the idea that it differs in all these respects from the great secular writers of antiquity is likewise one that survived all through the Middle Ages. As late as the second half of the fourteenth century, Benvenuto da Imola, commenting on the line in Dante in which Beatrice’s manner of speaking is described (
Inf
. 2, 56:
e comminciommi a dir soave e piana
), writes:
et bene dicit, quia sermo divinus est suavis et planus, non altus et superbus sicut sermo Virgilii et poetarum
—although Beatrice as a mouthpiece of divine wisdom has to say much that is dark and difficult.

The medieval Christian drama falls perfectly within this tradition. Being a living representation of Biblical episodes as contained, with their innately dramatic elements, in the liturgy, it opens its arms invitingly to receive the simple and untutored and to lead them from the concrete, the everyday, to the hidden and the true—precisely as did that great plastic art of the medieval churches which, according to E. Mâle’s well-known theory, is supposed to have received decisive
stimuli from the mysteries, that is, from the religious drama. The purpose of the liturgical or more generally the Christian theater is attested from a very early period. In the tenth century Saint Ethelwold, Bishop of Winchester, describes a dramatized Easter ceremony used by some priests
ad fidem indocti vulgi ac neofitorum corroborandam
and recommends it as worthy of imitation (quoted after E. K. Chambers,
The Mediaeval Stage
, 2, 308). And in the twelfth century Suger of Saint-Denis puts it more profoundly and more generally in his frequently-quoted verse:
Mens hebes ad verum per materialia surgit
.

Let us now return to our text, the scene between Adam and Eve. It speaks
humili sermone
to the simple and pure in spirit. It situates the sublime event within their everyday lives, so that it is spontaneously present to them. Yet it does not forget that the subject is a sublime one; it leads from the simplest reality directly to the highest, most secret, and divine truth. The
Mystère d’Adam
is introduced by a liturgical reading of Scripture from Genesis, with lector and responding chorus. Then come the dramatized events of the Fall, with God Himself appearing among the dramatis personae. The story is carried on to the murder of Abel. And the conclusion of the whole is a procession of the Old Testament prophets announcing the coming of Christ. The scenes which render everyday contemporary life (the finest are the one between the Devil and Eve and the one here under discussion—two masterly pieces of incomparable purity, truly peers of the most perfect sculptures in Chartres, Reims, Paris, or Amiens) are, then, fitted into a Biblical and world-historical frame by whose spirit they are pervaded. And the spirit of the frame which encompasses them is the spirit of the figural interpretation of history. This implies that every occurrence, in all its everyday reality, is simultaneously a part in a world-historical context through which each part is related to every other, and thus is likewise to be regarded as being of all times or above all time. Let us begin with God Himself, who appears after the creation of the world and man to lead Adam and Eve into Paradise and make his will known to them. He is called
figura
. This term can be interpreted as referring simply to the priest who was to act—that is to say, be the figure for—the part and whom one hesitated to call Deus as one called the other actors Adam, Eve, etc. But a truly figural interpretation here seems likelier; for although God’s role in what actually takes place in the
Mystère d’Adam
is merely that of the lawgiver and the judge who punishes transgression, yet the redeeming
Saviour is already figurally present in him. The stage direction announcing his appearance reads as follows:
Tunc veniet Salvator indutus dalmatica, et statuantur choram eo Adam et Eva. … Et stent ambo coram Figura. …
God, then, is first called
Salvator
and only afterward
Figura
, which would seem to justify the explanation:
figura salvatoris
. This supratemporal figural conception is taken up again later on. When Adam has eaten of the apple, he is immediately overcome by the most profound remorse. He breaks out into desperate self-accusations, which finally turn against Eve too, and which conclude as follows:

(Through your advice I have been brought to evil, from a great height I have fallen into great depth. I shall not be raised from it by man born of woman, unless it be God in His Majesty. What am I saying, alas? Why did I name Him? He help me? I have angered Him. No one will help me now except the Son who will come forth from Mary. To no one can I turn for protection, since in God we kept no faith. Now then let everything be according to God’s will! There is no council but to die.)