The theological term hyperdulia combines two Greek words meaning “more than”
and “servitude.” It signifies service to the nth degree—super-service, as it were. It denotes the special veneration, next to the worship due to the Lord, to be paid to the Virgin in acknowledgment of her unique status as the Mother of God. Such ministrations to Mary sprang up in the Middle Ages. Among the many groups and individuals who aspired to render tribute of this kind, the Cistercians stood out for the intensity of their deference. The Virgin occupied the center of their universe (see Fig. 3.3). They consecrated themselves to her, and in return she acted as their hidden advantage. If the search for salvation had been a card game, she would have been their ace in the hole.
In all their locations, the Cistercians were marked by their aspirations toward simplicity, asceticism, and holiness, and they strove toward all three goals at least partly in the name of Mary. We can be confident that the Madonna was the sole female presence in the otherwise all-male environment of most monasteries. What
was she doing there? She exemplified monastic virtues, since she practiced asceticism and study. Like at least some of the monks, she remained a lifelong virgin. As all of them had taken a vow to be, she was chaste. Mary also specialized in intercession.
This was likewise the remit of monks, especially white ones. In this capacity, she was the sovereign mediator, the special patron and point person for their whole order.
Christianity is, by its very definition, Christocentric. Yet Jesus can be forbidding and fearful, even terrorizing, to the skittish. Here the intercessory role of the Virgin enters the picture or even (since images are at stake) becomes it. (In emergencies, she is the hotline to call. Better still, she is the switchboard operator.) She can be asked to approach Christ for any help that is needed. Jesus remains at the top in the hierarchy of the holy, but the Mother of God comes next, well before saints and incalculably far before ordinary people on earth.
Fig. 3.3 Jehan Bellegambe, The Virgin Sheltering the Order of Cîteaux, 1507. Oil on panel, 91 x 74 cm.
Douai, Musée de la Chartreuse. Image courtesy of Musée de la Chartreuse, Douai.
In this world, self-help or how-to guidance played no role, except in figuring out how best to beseech Mary for her intercession. She was the genie whose response to prayer would be “Your wish is my command.”Among the highest and rarest forms of devotion that faithful followers could promise was to consecrate themselves to the service of the Virgin. In a way the tumbler manifests this type of observance. Merely by joining the Cistercian order, he takes upon himself an institution-wide obligation to practice devotion to the Mother of God. Beyond any official responsibility, he undertakes a personal commitment by descending into the crypt to perform his routine in honor of her.
In return for his dedication the tumbler seeks no specific recompense, least of all a miracle. Although the Virgin wipes or fans his sweat-beaded brow, we are not given to understand that he has any awareness of the gesture. He apparently has no idea that she has taken upon herself to be his guardian angel. From what we can judge, whatever she does is impalpable and immaterial to him. We learn only that others witness the boon he garners from Mary herself for the attentiveness he has displayed toward her Madonna. Such care in the fulfillment of obligations toward the Mother of God is a hallmark of lay brothers as they are portrayed by their advocates in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. When the soul of the lay brother is wrested from the devil, thanks to Mary, the performer is already dead. Consequently, he does not know while still a mortal the premium he has earned. He has not received breast milk from the Mother of God, as legend would hold that Bernard of Clairvaux did, but he has been saved. In the process, the very nature of Christian worship has been demystified.
The hocus-pocus of the liturgy has been set aside.
The entertainer’s constancy is distinctive in its specific form of expression, but parallels the solitary worship of the Virgin by this Doctor of the Church. The saint’s trueheartedness to the Mother of God is well attested from sermons and prayers, and his voice, amplified by successors who only heightened the intensity of his Marianism, became a dominant one in the Mariology of his day. Both before and after him, Cistercian writers were passionate proponents of Mary. After championing the Blessed Virgin in his lifetime, Bernard was laid to rest before her altar. In his own afterlife, he achieved recognition for his dedication to the Mother of God from Dante, who chose the sainted white monk as his final lodestar in the Divine Comedy.
Eight hundred years after his death, Bernard was memorialized for his inspirational relationship with the Virgin by being pictured with her on a commemorative stamp from the Vatican.
Across the various orders, and across time, Christian monks and nuns have viewed Mary as embodying monastic virtues. Among the qualities in the Mother of God that Cistercians would have found resonant with their own values, humility and chastity are salient. Bernard, among others, admired the characteristic of humbleness in her above (or below) everyone else. Another trait of the Virgin that could have exercised
special appeal to white monks is her uncommunicativeness. In the Gospels, she is nearly wordless, and in scenes and sermons of the Passion she is frequently sketched as expressing an unvoiced grief. Humility, chastity, and silence are all qualities associated in Cistercianism with lay brothers too.
Without saying so, Our Lady’s Tumbler peels back the overlayer from the self-contradictions of the entire Western monastic tradition, especially as the Cistercians adapted and articulated it. It sets the stage for its audience, whether readers or listeners, to examine many major imponderables of monkish life. To single out four examples, it explores how much conformity to collective liturgy, as opposed to individual worship, life in a monastery requires, how individual seclusion relates to group living and praying, how much asceticism and physical expression of devotion the order calls for or allows, and how much the imperative to obedience within the priorities of such religious societies may be upstaged by allegiance to God and his intermediaries.
Among its other distinguishing features, the Cistercian order has been marked since its very commencement by its fealty to the Virgin. Cîteaux arose in a century that was stamped on all sides by confident dedication to the worship of Mary and unwavering trust in her. Even in a prevailing climate of fevered Marianism, even against a backdrop of such generally intense commitment to the Mother of God, the white monks were second to none. In a letter censorious of their liturgical innovations, the theologian Peter Abelard (d. 1142) commented upon the custom that these brothers maintained in consecrating all their churches to the Virgin. In the same spirit, the seals of most of their abbeys bore her image, first as their mediator with God and later as their special protector (see Fig. 3.4). These emblems, mostly of wax, featured within an architectural canopy in Gothic style an image of the Virgin, usually with Child.
Fig. 3.4 Cistercian seal depicting the Virgin surrounded by devotees.
Seal (modern cast from original), ca. 1300–1500. Paris, Archives nationales.
© Genevra Kornbluth, 2011. All rights reserved.
Mary was not decreed a queen by the pope until 1954, but the Middle Ages greeted her routinely in that capacity—and that reginal reverence held particularly true for the white monks. An early statute stipulated officially that every Cistercian church and cloister should be founded in honor of the “Queen of Heaven and Earth.” Not the faintest doubt exists that by this formulation the Mother of God is meant. The designation of the Virgin as Queen of Heaven and Earth had been conventional for a long time already. This status positioned her to operate as a unique conduit between the two realms. In an extension of this power, relics of her and of physical contact with her earthly self could also provide petitioners with a pipeline to God and all the holiness surrounding him on high. Madonnas, as images of her, could fulfill the same funneling function.
The Virgin, along with these tokens of her, arbitrated between the simplicity of humble believers in the sublunary realm and the loftiness of God above. She was not unapproachable and unresponsive in her queenliness. On the contrary, she thrust herself forward as mediator. In medieval and theological terms, she came not as an accessory to the crime but as an intercessor for the sinner. The movements involved in Marian intercession were perceived to take place in both directions. Petitions from votaries on earth were relayed to Christ in heaven. Rebounding in the opposite course, expressions of divine grief, joy, and other emotions were transmitted from heaven through visions or animated images. Those celestial feelings could take palpable terrestrial form, with tears, milk, blood, and oil being four of the most common drippings that exuded from the Virgin, especially as represented in Madonnas. In the Middle Ages, virgin olive oil was not at all the same as today.
Veneration of the Mother of God belonged among the paramount manifestations of Christian practice. To go further, it reigned supreme in that same class. Consequently, nothing is strange about the fact that the liturgies of the Cistercians were heavily Marian. Each of the daily offices features a special reflection on her vocation. Since the thirteenth century, each day in a monastery of white monks has been capped by the singing of “Hail, Holy Queen” as the final antiphon. This hymn praises the Virgin in her guise as Mother of Mercy who intercedes with the Lord. It can be difficult to know which personage is meant when a Mary is mentioned within a Cistercian context. A reference to a woman by this name could allude to the historical person, the Jewish woman who was the mother of Christ; to the patroness of the order, ever to be trusted to champion the life- and soul-saving of contrite sinners; to the buildings dedicated to her, especially in this case all Cistercian churches and most cathedrals; or to the mother Church as an institution.
Since 1109, Cistercian monks have not worn the black vestments of the Benedictine order from which they branched off. Rather, they dress in ones of natural, unwhitened, and uncolored wool. The resultant hue is off-white, effectively a beige. For all that, the brethren have tended to be called white monks. In the Middle Ages, they were also
known sometimes as gray monks. In either case, they were dyed in the wool for being undyed. Wherever we place the color of the Cistercians’ unbleached woolen habits on the chromatic spectrum, the most common explanation for the adoption of this lightness in preference to black was a specific of Marian symbolism. The color honors Mary’s purity and spotlessness. A hue unblemished by blackness is what immaculate conveys etymologically in the original Latin: unstained and ultraclean.
The Cistercians wore clothing as white as a sheet—a modern and not a medieval one, since bed linens would not have had the incandescence often prized today for its connotation of cleanness. The whiteness betokened not ghostliness or fear, but virginal purity. More than once, they explained the color as bespeaking their service to the bright splendor of the Mother of God. In legend, the change from black to its opposite resulted directly from an apparition of the Virgin. One August morning, Mary made herself visible among the monks as they chanted matins. Not stopping at merely appearing, she went up to the second abbot of Cîteaux and later Saint Alberic, and threw a white cowl over his shoulders (see Fig. 3.5). At this moment, the habits of all the other monks present also turned the same color. The bright cleanliness of Mary makes even more vivid her gesture of having a towel supplied to suck up the saline solution that sluices from the tumbler.
Fig. 3.5 St. Alberic receives the Cistercian habit from the Virgin. Fresco, 1732–1752. Zirc, Zirc Abbey Church. Image from Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
File:Alberic_receives_habit.jpg
Bernard of Clairvaux, who championed the growing cult of the Virgin, has himself been described as Mary’s greatest devotee. Since the eight hundredth anniversary of his death, he has been called the Marian Doctor. By extension, the Cistercians have been styled collectively as missionaries of Marianism. The saint’s principal work of Mariology would be four homilies on the verse in Luke “The angel Gabriel was sent.”
These circulated together under the title On the Praises of the Virgin Mother. Other homilies of his deal with Mary too. Bernard’s famous sermons on the Song of Songs identify the betrothed in that book of the Bible as the Mother of God. He articulates his commitment to her in a way analogous to the dynamics of courtly love. He came honestly by his cloisterly courtliness, since before becoming a monk he had been the son of a knightly family. By breeding and upbringing, he was destined to be versed in the culture and ethos of chivalry and chivalric love, with their distinctive ideology and poetry. Perhaps to buff Bernard’s Marian credentials, he was misassigned authorship of texts about the Blessed Virgin in the composition of which he had no hand. Thus, he was often wrongly credited with authorship of a beloved Latin liturgical hymn,
“Hail, Star of the Sea,” which honors her. In a further miscue, he is sometimes still supposed to have composed the prayer to her known as the Memorare, while in fact it is apparently from the fifteenth century.
By all accounts, Mary was as favorably disposed toward Bernard as he was toward her. According to many legends, she had a stand-by-her-man loyalty to the holy man.
Sometimes statues of Our Lady pumped the affection of the Virgin toward him. Take, for instance, a Madonna in the Benedictine abbey of Affligem, a Belgian municipality.
The image reputedly leaned down to receive the “Hail, Mary” of the saint-to-be as he prostrated himself at her feet one day in 1146. In return, she said “Greetings, Bernard.”
The legendary episode allegedly prompted him to give the monastery his staff and chalice. This was far from the strangest case in which the Virgin and a Madonna bestowed their favor upon a devotee.