Do we have a conception of the ‘holy’ in the world? People sometimes talk about buildings or localities as ‘thin places’ to suggest the immediate perception of the divine. A respect that is more than sentimental may attach to the physical object that is a Bible. But we have as an age no coherent understanding of the divine in the world beyond the words of Scripture and the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist. Even those understandings are contested.
Lee Palmer Wandel is an established scholar of the Reformation whose latest book brings before us a mediaeval map of a world in which matter can be ‘a medium of divine revelation’, and the loss of that map, swept away in the tidal waves of the sixteenth century. (As so often, it is the subtitle that tells you the substance of the work.) At the heart of the book is the thirteenth-century bestseller, the Rationale divinorum officiorum by Guillaume Durand, an all-embracing symbolic ‘theory of everything’ concerning divine worship which, using allegory, united everything from the altar vessels to the cement in the walls of a church. All the various elements come together in a symphony of divine revelation.
Durand’s Rationale was not an isolated work. Allegorical interpretations of the liturgy have existed since Tertullian’s de Baptismo, and at a popular level the Eucharist as a portrayal of the life of Christ was popular in both East and West. The Rationale itself built on earlier works like that by Amalarius of Metz, and until the sixteenth century it had an avid following probably mainly among clergy – it was rarely translated. One of the most often published works in the 1400s, after 1520 it was increasingly limited to presses in Lyons and Venice and saw no publication between 1672 and 1843 when a partial translation was produced in Anglo-Catholic England.
It has recently received more scholarly attention, and in that vein, Wandel, in Part I of the book, gives us a selection under four different topics: Ecclesia (church), Altars, Missals (to represent time) and Vestments.
The chapter on Ecclesia serves as an introduction to Durand’s method. ‘He gathered, and did not seek to order, organize, or prioritize an abundance of scriptural referents: the Body of Christ, a virgin, the bride of Christ, a mother, a daughter, a widow, a city. For him ecclesia recalled, evoked, and instantiated scriptural loci’. (p. 24) It symbolized the living Body of Christ, the worshipping community that encompasses the living and the dead. It was inseparable from human action: the building was ritually consecrated and, in case of ‘pollution’, might have to be reconsecrated. Its plan, if it was cruciform, reflected the human body: head, arms and body. That same body was also displayed in the crucifix that dominated the interior space.
Altars likewise accumulated meaning from the Old and New Testaments, from the action of the mass which was celebrated on them and from the relics contained within. ‘The meal, the cross and the tomb are not temporally sequential in an altar but materially simultaneous’. We have a ‘radical definition of life and death, spirit and flesh’. (86–87)
The subject of time is the one in which I find Wendel’s treatment more problematic. Her treatment of the Calendar pages in the Missal is misleading, not helped by omitting the days of the month (according to the Roman system) from her explanation of the illustrated page (109–112). Her claim that the Reformation ‘shattered the constellation of time and worship’ scarcely applies to many Lutheran churches or the Church of England, where the calendar was simplified but hardly shattered.
Wandel’s subsequent description of the Reformation in Part II is not just a battle over the sacrifice of the mass or papal authority but also a collapse of the symbolic world and its replacement by the Bible as sole witness to the presence and word of God. She presents it as an assault by Luther followed by other reformers, which brought the old system down like a card house. The created order was desacralized, now to be investigated and explained by rationalist science.
Or is it? Many of us live by liturgical seasons and have an innate feeling that churches, however bare, have a status about them which we can only describe as holy. Neil McGregor has described how some museum cases need to be cleaned repeatedly after visitors have reverenced the objects exhibited in them. And this month I visited Glastonbury Tor and witnessed groups of people holding a reverent silence there, or solemnly circumambulating the church tower. All that is lacking is a single overarching narrative like that which Durand provided.
But that is wandering into the present day. Wandel opens for us a view of a mediaeval world very different from our own, and if we hope to take history seriously, we cannot ignore it.
