Book Review: Le Goff on Voragine's "Summa on Time"

I purchased this book at Eighth Day Books a couple of months ago. According to the publisher, Princeton University Press:

It is impossible to understand the Middle Ages without grasping the importance of The Golden Legend, the most popular medieval collection of saints’ lives. Assembled in the thirteenth century by Genoese archbishop Jacobus de Voragine, the book became the medieval equivalent of a bestseller. In Search of Sacred Time is the first comprehensive history and interpretation of this crucial book. Jacques Le Goff, who was one of the world’s most renowned medievalists, provides a lucid and compelling account that shows how The Golden Legend Christianized time itself, reconciling human and divine temporality. Authoritative, eloquent, and original, In Search of Sacred Time is a major reinterpretation of a book that is central to comprehending the medieval imagination.

Before I comment further on Le Goff's analysis of Jacobus de Voragine's The Golden Legend, I have to bring up the strange error of fact he makes on page 99 and the question of whether the translator or the editor should have corrected Le Goff's error. To quote:

Since we do not know exactly what a belief in Purgatory meant in the devotions of North Italian Christians in the latter half of the thirteenth century, the best we can do is to point out that Purgatory (which the Second Vatican Council removed from dogma in the twentieth century) was a new and still imprecise idea . . .

It is simply not true that the Second Vatican Council removed Purgatory from the doctrine of the Catholic Church. Lumen Gentium, the Dogmatic Constitution of the Church states in paragraph 51:

This Sacred Council accepts with great devotion this venerable faith of our ancestors regarding this vital fellowship with our brethren who are in heavenly glory or who having died are still being purified; and it proposes again the decrees of the Second Council of Nicea,(20*) the Council of Florence (21*) and the Council of Trent.(22*)

By confirming the decree of the Council of Trent on Purgatory, the fathers of the Second Vatican Council affirmed that

The Catholic Church, instructed by the Holy Spirit and in accordance with sacred Scripture and the ancient Tradition of the Fathers, has taught in the holy Councils and most recently in this ecumenical Council that there is a purgatory and that the souls detained there are helped by the acts of intercession (suffragia) of the faithful, and especially by the acceptable sacrifice of the altar.

Therefore this holy Council commands the bishops to strive diligently that the sound doctrine of purgatory, handed down by the Holy Fathers and the sacred Councils, be believed by the faithful and that it be adhered to, taught and preached everywhere. (Fifth Session, 1563)

The other "holy Councils" that taught about Purgatory are the Council of Lyon and the Council of Florence (Lumen Gentium cites and affirms the latter). It's important to note that both Trent and Vatican II warned against abuses of this doctrine in practice, but Vatican II confirmed the doctrine of Purgatory and the Catechism of the Catholic Church in paragraphs 1030 to 1032 also confirms Church teaching on prayers for the dead. 

Why Le Goff, author of The Birth of Purgatory, made such an error is one question; why no editor (in the French original or English translation) corrected it or inserted a footnote explaining the error is another. Le Goff certainly provides no source for his statement (because there isn't any)! Lumen Gentium does not use the word "Purgatory"; did that omission confuse Le Goff? The Catechism should have cleared up his confusion.

That error just stunned me as I was reading the book, which I otherwise enjoyed because it is about two of my favorite religious subjects, the liturgical and sanctoral years--the cycle of seasons and feasts (fixed and movable) and saints' feast days. Archbishop Jacobus de Voragine divides the liturgical year into a cycle of salvation history as the "Temporale":

~The Time of Deviation (Adam to Moses--the Passion of Our Lord; the Purification and Annunciation)

~The Time of Renewal (Moses to the Nativity of Christ--Advent; Epiphany to Septuagesima/Lent, which includes the Octave of Easter)

~The Time of Reconciliation (Christmas to Epiphany and Easter to Pentecost)

~An hiatus between Christmas and Easter Season divided between the Times of Reconciliation and Pilgrimage

~The Time of Pilgrimage (Epiphany to Septuagesima during the Liturgical Calendar and our lives on earth)

Voragine also summarizes the Sanctorale: the feasts of martyrs and confessors, especially the martyrs of the Early Church, placing their feasts within the Temporale, so that Voragine presents, in Le Goff's opinion, a summa of time. The Christian lives in that time, sanctifying the Time of Pilgrimage by experiencing the liturgical year with the saints as models and intercessors. Thus the Church's calendar masters and renders our time on earth sacred. 

On page 18, Le Goff describes Voragine's purpose to explain "the meaning of human time" to make "it possible to experience it" by demonstrating the "relations between the divine time of humanity that is real time and chronological time"--which is one reason as Le Goff says that Voragine is uncomfortable with the cycle of movable feasts in the Church's year. Those are the greatest feasts, after all, in the Times of Renewal and Reconciliation: Septuagesima/Lent, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost. Le Goff suggests that Voragine was either so attached to stability, a Divine attribute or "baffled by the complex calculations" used to determine the date of Easter and thereby all the movable feast before and after it. (p. 85)

Le Goff praises Voragine's story telling ability in the details about the lives of the saints and their miracles and good works; he emphasizes that Voragine is always interested in presenting historical facts (including dates) even though he gets them wrong; and that the Archbishop demonstrates an interest in the meaning of names (etymology) and numbers, particularly using numerical interpretative lists (three reasons for the season of Septuagesima; three characteristics of the Passion; four reasons for the significance of the Circumcision of Our Lord, etc), and his use, although sometimes incorrect, of major authorities and sources, St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, and others--even though, again, sometimes he confuses them (citing a sermon by Caesarius of Arles but ascribing it to St. Augustine, for example)--overall, Le Goff admires Voragine's achievement as an historian and as an important, complex, and subtle thirteenth century thinker (cf. p. 86).

There are two other sections that raised doubts in my mind that Le Goff was as complex and subtle a thinker he needed to be when dealing with certain distinctions he saw in Voragine's work:

1. The Annunciation

Le Goff emphasizes that Voragine highlights this feast as the Annunciation of the Lord versus the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary. He suggests as a possible hypothesis that the "Dominican Order's hostility in the thirteenth century toward the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary" is behind this (for that time*) unique view of this feast. (p. 95) But even St. Thomas Aquinas in his Summa, Question 27, Article 1 accepts the sinlessness of the Mother of God, sanctified in her mother's womb, if not at the moment of conception:

On the contrary, The Church celebrates the feast of our Lady's Nativity. Now the Church does not celebrate feasts except of those who are holy. Therefore even in her birth the Blessed Virgin was holy. Therefore she was sanctified in the womb.

I answer that, Nothing is handed down in the canonical Scriptures concerning the sanctification of the Blessed Mary as to her being sanctified in the womb; indeed, they do not even mention her birth. But as Augustine, in his tractate on the Assumption of the Virgin, argues with reason, since her body was assumed into heaven, and yet Scripture does not relate this; so it may be reasonably argued that she was sanctified in the womb. For it is reasonable to believe that she, who brought forth "the Only-Begotten of the Father full of grace and truth," received greater privileges of grace than all others: hence we read (Luke 1:28) that the angel addressed her in the words: "Hail full of grace!"

Moreover, it is to be observed that it was granted, by way of privilege, to others, to be sanctified in the womb; for instance, to Jeremias, to whom it was said (Jeremiah 1:5): "Before thou camest forth out of the womb, I sanctified thee"; and again, to John the Baptist, of whom it is written (Luke 1:15): "He shall be filled with the Holy Ghost even from his mother's womb." It is therefore with reason that we believe the Blessed Virgin to have been sanctified before her birth from the womb.

Therefore, I don't think that Archbishop Jacobus de Voragine, OP emphasized the Annunciation of the Lord above the Annunciation to Mary because of opposition to her Immaculate Conception, since the leading Dominican theologian accepted belief in her sinlessness before her birth from the womb. Le Goff provides as a better explanation that Voragine wanted to emphasize the Incarnation of Jesus as the entry of God into human time, sanctifying it, because "Christ incarnate is truly the center of time." (p. 95)

The whole debate about the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary began with Eadmer, the monk of Christ Church in Canterbury and friend of Saint Anselm of Canterbury with the publication of the former's De Conceptione sanctae Mariae

*In the revisions of the Roman Missal and Calendar in 1970, the name of the feast was changed from The Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary (as it is called in the Roman Missal of 1962) to The Annunciation of Our Lord.

2. The Birth of the Virgin Mary

It seemed to me that Le Goff confused the births of Mary and St. John the Baptist. Le Goff notes that Voragine considers the background in the Old Testament of mothers giving birth to sons long after their childbearing years: Sarah and her son Isaac; Manoah's wife and Samson; Hannah and her son Samuel. Then he says: "Thus Elizabeth's birth to a mother who had long been sterile was not exceptional." And he repeats: "Elizabeth was not unique as the daughter of a long barren mother . . . she belongs to a category with Old Testament antecedents."  (p. 123) Doesn't he mean "Mary's birth to a mother [St. Anne according to the Protoevangelicum of James] who had long been sterile"? and "Mary was not unique as the daughter of a long barren mother"? 

Elizabeth was barren until she and Zechariah conceived St. John the Baptist, as announced to Zechariah by Gabriel in the first chapter of the Gospel according to St. Luke. She was the mother of a son conceived late in life (John) as St. Anne was the mother of a daughter (Mary) conceived late in life. So I'm not sure how Le Goff confused these later pregnancies of Elizabeth and Anne. It's certainly not in The Golden Legend, which does rely on the Protoevangelicum and St. Bede, as Le Goff notes.

Again, I wonder if some copy-editor along the way shouldn't have corrected this confusion; I don't have access to the original French edition; surely this is not an error in translation?!?

In spite of these three anomalies (the status of Purgatory as Catholic doctrine; the debated teaching about the Immaculate Conception and the title of the feast of the Annunciation; and the confusion about the birth of the Blessed Virgin Mary), I enjoyed this book very much. 

Le Goff sees a fellow historian doing his best to get it right in Jacobus de Voragine and The Golden Legend. As he states on page 115:

it seems to me that he [Voragine] sees in time, which is a gift from God, above all an instrument for explaining the march of humanity and a means whereby man, guided by the lessons of liturgical time and the exemplary character of the time of the saints, may achieve perfection.

Neither Voragine, nor Le Goff, nor this reviewer has achieved perfection, but I recommend this book: Le Goff tried to get it right in expressing his admiration for Voragine in his Summa on time, liturgical, sanctoral, and during the pilgrimage of life until the end of the world. He demonstrates how the author of The Golden Legend tried to help his fellow Christians live in the real time, the time that matters, not just the chronological time of day to day life, but with eternal life in mind as revealed by the Catholic Church in her liturgy, history, and people.

After all, we don't know how long the Time of Pilgrimage will last for any of us or for the world!

Image credit (public domain): the cover of In Search of Sacred Time features a detail from Lorenzo di Credi's Annunciation; here is an image of the entire painting.

"History Today"--April Issue On-line Highlights

I'm not sure how long these stories will be available for free online, but there are several that interest me today:

A discussion of the last king of the House of Valois, Henri III, by the author of a new biography of the same:

In the 19th century, Henry appeared in the novels of Alexandre Dumas and other works of fiction. In 1941 Pierre Champion began a biography, but died before completing it. Following the Second World War, historical biography fell into disrepute among French academics, who preferred to study man as part of a group, but in the last decades the form has regained academic respectability. In 1985 Pierre Chevallier published a substantial biography of Henry III bearing the subtitle: ‘a Shakespearean king’. Since then Jacqueline Boucher, Nicolas Le Roux, Denis Crouzet, Monique Chatenet, Xavier Le Person and others have revolutionised our understanding of the reign. Unfortunately their contributions remain largely unknown to English-speaking readers. The only biography of Henry III in English, by Martha Walker Freer, dates from 1858.

Recent research has exploded the myth of Henry as an ineffectual and pleasure-seeking monarch surrounded by mignons, effeminate young men with absurd hair-dos. Henry is now seen as a highly intelligent and conscientious monarch who tried to bring peace to his troubled kingdom. Pleasure loving he may have been, but Boucher has shown that he spent long hours reading official reports and replying to them. Hundreds of his letters have been published by the Société de l’Histoire de France since 1959. Intellectually, Henry was also keen to learn: he set up a Palace Academy at the Louvre, where leading scholars discussed philosophy, astronomy or other topics. As for the mignons, far from being the parvenus of legend, they were mostly the sons of long-serving provincial nobles. They represented an attempt by Henry to use men of his own generation rather than older ministers chosen by his mother, Catherine de’ Medici.

A comparison between modern surveillance and the Tudor spy network:

Analogies between modern Britain and early modern England can also be seen in the history of social welfare. Beveridge and the creators of the welfare state hoped that by making benefits universal they would remove the stigma associated with poverty. Welfare benefits would simply be ‘social’ rights that would be as generally acceptable as property and political rights. However, opposition to taxation, benefits means testing and fears over fraud have led to the wholesale sharing of data between government bodies such as the Department of Work and Pensions and HM Revenue and Customs. ‘Troubled’ families are now targeted for various forms of social intervention to prevent them from becoming a burden on the state.

Similarly, during the English Reformation, the Dissolution of the Monasteries led to the destruction of institutions such as hospitals, which had traditionally assisted the poor. The Reformation’s emphasis on salvation by faith also undermined the belief in the spiritual efficacy of charitable works, although that does not mean that Christian charity vanished. These religious, economic and social shifts led to a perceived crisis of welfare. The response of the Tudor state was to supplement the promptings of Christian charity with the legal requirements of the Poor Laws. Each locality was to raise funds through a poor rate and disburse them to those in need via overseers. Over the following centuries this system came to be seen by the poor as a right. Yet the response of rate payers was increasingly to view the poor as a nuisance to be controlled. Consequently the Poor Laws spawned a vast system of surveillance to determine the circumstances of families and the parentage of illegitimate children.

The recounting of an exorcism conducted by a missionary Catholic priest in Elizabethan London by Jessie Childs, set in the context of the English Reformation:

Few periods of English history have endured such liberal applications of hindsight as the Golden Age of Good Queen Bess. It may indeed have been a time of glorious national achievement, but the country was not, with a nod to Sellar and Yeatman, ‘bound to be C of E’. The children of Henry VIII (whose own brand of reformation was unpredictable) had hardly imbued their subjects with a sense of religious stability. As Daniel Defoe put it, the country had swung ‘from the Romish religion to reformed, from reformed back again to Romish, and then to reformed again’. By 1586 Elizabeth I had been on the throne for just over a quarter of a century, long enough for the dizziness to have subsided, long enough for a new generation to have been raised on the Book of Common Prayer and long enough – just – for the word ‘Protestant’ to have become an acceptable term of self-reference. It was not so long, however, for Elizabethan Catholics to have stopped praying for one more swing of the pendulum. Often their prayers were linked to those for ‘God’s prisoner’, Mary, Queen of Scots, still alive in 1586 and still, for most people, England’s putative heir.

Church attendance was compulsory in Elizabethan England, the fine for absenteeism having been raised in 1581 from 12 pence to a swingeing £20 a month. Most Catholics conformed, some only occasionally or partially, and suffered the label ‘church papist’ or ‘schismatic’ for their sins. Those who persisted in their nonconformity were known as recusants (from the Latin recusare: to refuse). Many of them hoped, not only for freedom of worship, but also for the restoration of the Catholic faith in England. They were a minority – thousands in a population of around four million – but they had a loud voice, amplified by powerful friends on the Continent. ‘God has already granted’, declared Mary I’s widower, Philip II of Spain, ‘that by my intervention and my hand that kingdom has previously been restored to the Catholic Church once.’ It was an ominous statement of chutzpah and intent.

And from the magazine's blog, this examination of Jacques le Goff's legacy as an Annales historian:

By showing how it could be applied meaningfully to transform perceptions of major problems in the study of the past, Le Goff ensured that the Annales School had an enduring relevance for historical scholarship. Thanks to works such as La Naissance du Purgatoire and Pour un autre Moyen Âge, its influence both in medieval studies and more widely has become palpable. Not only are undergraduates now introduced to the Annalistes’ ideas as a matter of course, but the scholarly value of such topics as popular culture and environmental history is also appreciated by historians around the world, especially in those regions (such as Britain and the US) which were previously most hostile to the Annales approach. And it was only right that by the time of Le Goff’s death on April 1st, 2014, he had been elevated to the pantheon of modern historians.

But if Le Goff’s contribution should be celebrated for having resurrected the Annales School from its mid-century Purgatory, his death is also an occasion to reflect once again on the future of the nouvelle histoire. While it may be true that few scholars now doubt the merit of the approach he pioneered, it is striking that the grand vision which marked both his work and that of his most eminent colleagues has perhaps not survived the test of time as well as it might.

Much good reading there on four interesting topics.

Jacques le Goff, RIP

According to The Guardian, historian Jacques le Goff has died:

The historian Jacques Le Goff died in Paris on Tuesday aged 90, his family told newspaper Le Monde.

Over a long and influential career in academia and public broadcasting, Le Goff transformed views of the middle ages from a dark and backward time to a period that laid the foundations for modern western civilisation.

He was a leading proponent of "new history" – the shift in historical research from emphasis on political figures and events to mentality and anthropology. . . .

His many books included works on middle age intellectuals, bankers and merchants, a biography of King Louis IX and a seminal work on the introduction of the concept of purgatory.

"By transforming our view of the middle ages, you have changed the way we deal with history," Le Goff was told when awarded the prestigious Dr AH Heineken prize for history in 2004, whose jury described him as "without doubt the most influential French historian alive today".

I think that Le Goff's views of the middle ages were certainly shared by and articulated very effectively by Christopher Dawson in England and the USA, through his research on the spiritual tradition (Christianity) that infused Western Civilization. And Regine Pernoud's Those Terrible Middle Ages! also helped strip away the darkness imposed on the Middle Ages by the Enlightenment. But in popular thought (if that's not a contradiction in terms) the Middle Ages is still the dark, benighted, superstitious (that is, Catholic) era between the brightness of Greece and Rome and the rebirth of that brightness in the Renaissance (witness the EU's proposed constitution, which skips the era entirely!). Perhaps the fact that Le Goff was an agnostic helped his argument for the Middle Ages prevail in academia! 

One of Le Goff's most influential books was The Birth of Purgatory, translated by Arthur Goldhammer for The University of Chicago Press:

In The Birth of Purgatory, Jacques Le Goff, the brilliant medievalist and renowned Annales historian, is concerned not with theological discussion but with the growth of an idea, with the relation between belief and society, with mental structures, and with the historical role of the imagination. Le Goff argues that the doctrine of Purgatory did not appear in the Latin theology of the West before the late twelfth century, that the word purgatorium did not exist until then. He shows that the growth of a belief in an intermediate place between Heaven and Hell was closely bound up with profound changes in the social and intellectual reality of the Middle Ages. Throughout, Le Goff makes use of a wealth of archival material, much of which he has translated for the first time, inviting readers to examine evidence from the writings of great, obscure, or anonymous theologians. 

His most recently published book is about The Golden Legend, published by Princeton University Press: In Search of Sacred Time: Jacobus de Voragine and The Golden Legend:

It is impossible to understand the late Middle Ages without grasping the importance of The Golden Legend, the most popular medieval collection of saints' lives. Assembled for clerical use in the thirteenth century by Genoese archbishop Jacobus de Voragine, the book became the medieval equivalent of a best seller. By 1500, there were more copies of it in circulation than there were of the Bible itself. Priests drew on The Golden Legend for their sermons, the faithful used it for devotion and piety, and artists and writers mined it endlessly in their works. In Search of Sacred Time is the first comprehensive history and interpretation of this crucial book. Jacques Le Goff, one of the world's most renowned medievalists, provides a lucid, compelling, and unparalleled account of why and how The Golden Legend exerted such a profound influence on medieval life.

In Search of Sacred Time explains how The Golden Legend--an encyclopedic work that followed the course of the liturgical calendar and recounted the life of the saint for each feast day--worked its way into the fabric of medieval life. Le Goff describes how this ambitious book was carefully crafted to give sense and shape to the Christian year, underscoring its meaning and drama through the stories of saints, miracles, and martyrdoms. Ultimately, Le Goff argues, The Golden Legend influenced how medieval Christians perceived the passage of time, Christianizing time itself and reconciling human and divine temporality.

Authoritative, eloquent, and original, In Search of Sacred Time is a major reinterpretation of a book that is central to comprehending the medieval imagination.