Liturgical Celebrations with Emotional Expectations in Auxerre, 840-908
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Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 2012 Liturgical Celebrations with Emotional Expectations in Auxerre, 840-908 Thomas A. Greene Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the Medieval History Commons Recommended Citation Greene, Thomas A., "Liturgical Celebrations with Emotional Expectations in Auxerre, 840-908" (2012). Dissertations. 413. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/413 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 2012 Thomas A. Greene LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO LITURGICAL CELEBRATIONS WITH EMOTIONAL EXPECTATIONS IN AUXERRE, 840-908 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY PROGRAM IN HISTORY BY THOMAS ANTHONY GREENE CHICAGO, ILLINOIS DECEMBER 2012 Copyright by Thomas Anthony Greene, 2012 All rights reserved. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I have incurred a number of debts while working on the dissertation, and I would be remiss not to acknowledge them. From the time that I began my return to graduate school, the faculty at Loyola University Chicago have been unfailingly supportive throughout my tenure as a graduate student. Profs. Mooney-Melvin and Hirsch made the application process and the transition from the corporate to the academic world seamless. My dissertation committee (Profs. Rosenwein, Gross-Diaz and Dossey), along with Prof. Frantzen of the English Department, shepherded me through the dissertation process with wisdom and unimpeachable patience. Prof. Bucholz has served as much as a confessor as an academic mentor, and I have benefitted throughout my graduate career from his humor, kindness and humanity. I have also been fortunate enough to receive a great degree of institutional support while working towards the completion of my Ph.D. Loyola awarded me a teaching assistantship, as well as advanced doctoral funding, and both the Graduate School and the History Department helped defray the cost of traveling to conferences. I was able to dip into archival research at an early stage thanks to a Heckman Stipend from the Hill Monastic Museum and Library. The Arthur J. Schmitt Foundation generously funded a year of dissertation work, and the Birgit Baldwin Award from the Medieval Academy of America made possible an extended stay in Paris. iii I have also forged a number of important and rewarding personal relationships over the years. My closest Chicago friends include Will Cavert, Andrew Donnelly, Kristina Grob, Dan O’Gorman, Amy Oberlin, Kaitlin Pontzer, Abby Schmidt, Panos Siampos and Surti Singh, but the list extends to others no less important at Loyola and indeed at other institutions around the country and around the world: Paola Andreuzzi, Tara Flanagan, Paul Hilliard, Eleanor Janega, Thomas Juettner, Marian Martin, Richard Pollard, Kristin Skottki…I won’t continue only out of fear of unintentionally omitting someone. My memories of these people coincide with places and situations that have been important throughout my graduate career: daily trips for coffee with Abby; long, late-night conversations over drinks at the Hopleaf with Dan or at Edgewater Lounge with Amy; burgers at Kuma’s Corner with Andrew or Dan or Abby; evenings spent at the Map Room after paleography class; the shared suffering of Latin translation at Beck’s; a dramatic cross-country trip back from Vagantes that took Andrew and Dan and me from Berkeley to Chicago with a detour into a Colorado snowbank. These experiences and more – too numerous to recall – define my time at Loyola every bit as much as classes and the dissertation. But most importantly I want to acknowledge the role played by my family. Mentioning this is trite, perhaps, and certainly expected, but without their constant support I never would have reached the end. My parents might not have always understood why this degree is so important to me, but they never doubted that it is. For this, I will be forever in their debt. iv L'existentialiste ne croît pas à la puissance de la passion. Il ne pensera jamais qu'une belle passion est un torrent dévastateur qui conduit fatalement l'homme à certains actes, et qui par conséquent est une excuse. Il pense que l'homme est responsable de sa passion. — Jean-Paul Sartre, L'existentialisme est un humanisme TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii INTRODUCTION: EMOTIONS, HISTORY AND THE MONKS OF SAINT-GERMAIN (AUXERRE) 1 Emotions and Carolingian Religious Culture 9 Saint-Germain (Auxerre) 19 CHAPTER ONE: DE FILIIS IRAE FACIT FILIOS DEI: EMOTIONAL TRANSFORMATION DURING CAROLINGIAN BAPTISM 27 Sens and Orléans: Differing Emotional Expectations 32 Exspectationem futurorum bonorum: Haimo of Auxerre 38 De uasis irae: Heiric of Auxerre 50 Conclusion 64 CHAPTER TWO: LACRIMA NON FALLIT: SIN AND FORGIVENESS IN THE MONASTERY OF SAINT-GERMAIN (AUXERRE) 66 Ligare non timeant: Penance and the Secular Clergy 76 Ad spem ueniae peccatorum: Forgiveness between Brothers 81 Agite paenitentiam: The Necessity of Penitence 94 Lacrima non fallit: Emotional Expression and Penitence 100 Conclusion 108 CHAPTER THREE: ILLUD TERRIBILE SACRAMENTUM: THE EUCHARISTIC THEOLOGY OF HAIMO OF AUXERRE 110 Vera est caro: Haimo on the Nature of Christ’s Body 115 Manna absconditum: Discernment and the Eucharist 119 Quia omnes communicant: Participation in the Eucharistic Ceremony 125 Cum timore et tremore: The Emotional Experience of the Eucharist 134 Conclusion 143 CHAPTER FOUR: ARDENTI AFFECTU: THE EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE OF THE MASS IN LATE-NINTH CENTURY AUXERRE 147 Pro vestra vestrorumque salute: The Mass and Salvation 154 Ecclesia cum sacerdos et sacerdos cum ecclesia: The Mass as Interactive Event 161 Non timoris est sed adoratio: Emotions during the Mass 164 Conclusion 175 CHAPTER FIVE: HOC AD DIEM IUDICII PERTINET: EMOTIONS, DEATH AND THE AFTERLIFE IN NINTH-CENTURY AUXERRE 178 Misericordiae tuae auxilium: The Pastoral Care of the Dying 189 vi Beatus, id est felix: The Emotional Eschatology of Haimo of Auxerre 198 Beata eius uisione: Heiric of Auxerre 212 Conclusion 228 CONCLUSION 230 BIBLIOGRAPHY 240 vii INTRODUCTION EMOTIONS, HISTORY AND THE MONKS OF SAINT-GERMAIN (AUXERRE) Throughout the middle decades of the ninth century, a monk named Haimo lived, taught and wrote in the monastery of Saint-Germain, in Auxerre. As he worked on a commentary on the Pauline letters, the apostle’s words inspired him to reflect on the proper way to receive the Eucharist. “We ought,” wrote the Auxerrois master in response to 1 Corinthians 11:29, “to advance to that terrifying sacrament with fear and trembling.”1 The biblical text mentioned only the discernment of the “body of the Lord.” But for Haimo, what took place at the altar led directly to the experience of an emotion, fear, and the expression of the same by trembling. The Eucharist was not unique in this regard; during the ninth century, Haimo and his intellectual heirs at Saint-Germain described similarly affective aspects of baptism, penance, the mass, and last rites. From birth to death, and indeed even after death, they expected emotions to suffuse the religious experiences of the Carolingian faithful. 1 The Patralogia Latina remains the only edition of Haimo’s Pauline commentary. Migne mistakenly attributes Haimo of Auxerre’s work throughout to Haimo of Halberstadt. Haimo, In divi Pauli epistolas expositio in Patrologia Latina, ed. Migne [henceforth PL] 117: 574: “Cum timore et tremore debemus accedere ad illud sacramentum terribile.” The biblical verse that generated the commentary of which this sentence is a part is: For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh judgment to himself, not discerning the body of the Lord. (1 Corinthians 11:29). All biblical citations are placed in italics and unless otherwise noted their translations are taken from the Douay-Rheims Bible website (http://www.drbo.org). 1 2 This subject – the emotional expectations promulgated by Auxerrois monks over the course of the ninth century – forms the core of my dissertation. The expression of affect was an essential part of medieval religious culture, especially in the context of the experience of the liturgical activity that structured Christian life. I explore the relationship between emotions and the liturgy in the monastery of Saint-Germain, in Auxerre (which lay within the Archdiocese of Sens). I argue that in their exegesis and homilies the Carolingian clerical elite communicated their expectations, idealized to be sure, for emotional experience and expression during the five major liturgical events that structured the lives of the devout: baptism, penance, the mass, the celebration of the Eucharist and last rites.2 Christians could monitor, assess and adjust as necessary the affective component of their spirituality. This is seen, for example, in Haimo of Auxerre’s admonition that opened this chapter. A communicant should “investigate himself” (discutiat se) to see if he was worthy of receiving the Eucharist. That assessment of worthiness led to a proper interpretation of the fear that Haimo believed inhered in all who took part in the sacrament; but the worthy feared for a different reason than the unworthy. The only way to properly interpret one’s emotional state was to examine how one felt and why that feeling existed. For the most part, monks made up the intended audience for the communication of these texts. This dissertation, then, is primarily about both the religious culture of monks and about emotions. Interest in the history of emotions is not new but has 2 There was no one, unified “emotional style” of liturgical participation. See pp. 23-26 for the details of each author and event. 3 recently become a popular topic of historical study.