No pain, no gain.
After the abbot has seen the monkish acrobat in action, nothing happens for a while to rupture the ritual. But eventually the leader of the community bids the tumbler to meet with him. A summons from a person higher in the hierarchy can be overawing, along the lines of a subpoena—literally an injunction to come “under penalty.” Being dragged into the boss’s office or into a judge’s chambers is not often a good thing.
The lay brother shows up in a fright for the interview with his superior. He is not braced for a David-and-Goliath fight of lone laic against “the man.” Instead, he is scared nearly to death that he is to be drummed out of the cloister. The outcome is not what he expects. Quite the contrary: he finds himself praised—a monastery is just the place for his cultlike devotion. Upon realizing that he is not in trouble, he goes weak in the knees and swoons from what might be diagnosed medically as orthostatic hypotension. At least in the case of the enervated entertainer, the physiological effects of breakneck change from grave apprehensiveness to intense relief are dire.
Furthermore, they are compounded by exhaustion from untold days of repeated performances in the crypt. The result overwhelms his debilitated constitution. The initial fainting spell is only the first symptom of a more drastic turn for the worse. The
burdens, both physical and spiritual, have overtaxed the brother and take a dreadful toll. After a swift decline, he dies. His only hope for salvation rests upon the Virgin:
she remains, as she has been all along, his sole exit strategy. When the jongleur’s soul departs from his body to transit from the vale of tears (at death, human beings
“give up the ghost”—literally, they breathe out their spirit), Mary must release it from damnation by wresting it from the talons of demons. These agents of Satan thought to claim the tumbler’s spirit as theirs because of blemishes in the life he had led before entering the abbey. The performer is saved and ends up on the side of the angels, but only after a white-knuckle prelude in which punishment seems the likelier outcome.
Salvation could not come in more nip-and-tuck a fashion than this.
Although the sequence of events in which a celestial forearm handed down a towel from within a cumulus would seem to end with the jongleur on cloud nine, we are shown only that the mediation of the Virgin induces God or an angelic agent to spare him from perpetual torment. The hand is related to what is known technically as a manus Dei or dextera Dei. In Christian art, the motif of the divine (right) hand went back to late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. A full-length depiction of God as a human figure would have crossed the red line of the Second Commandment. Instead, the representation of a hand or hand and forearm symbolized the deity’s intervention in human affairs. The hand reminds the viewer that in medieval theology, God performs all miracles.
The aphorism that “death is the great equalizer” has been in circulation since the mid-nineteenth century at the latest. Such thinking would have been utterly foreign in the Middle Ages. Existence then was a cliffhanger until the very end. The episode of Our Lady’s Tumbler calls to mind scenes in art of the act that is called technically by the Greek compound psychostasis. Meaning “soul-weighing,” this operation is a stock element in Christian eschatology. When Jesus Christ presides at the Last Judgment, the Archangel Saint Michael weighs out a soul’s good and bad deeds on the pans of a scale to determine whether it will be damned or redeemed (see Fig. 3.22). In this endgame, Satan had anything but a take-no-prisoners outlook: he wanted all the hostages he could get. In iconography, such scenes often involve the spiritual part of a human being portrayed as a miniature body that is hotly contested by angels and demons. Vignettes of this sort record a last-minute (or just past the last minute) out-of-body experience. The immortal essences of lucky people are saved by the better angels of their natures—often, as in this case, with a little moonlighting by the Mother of God. Alongside all her other obligations, she has nearly unique powers to tip the balance in favor of those who have sinned. This capacity of hers explains why Mary is to die for. The tumbler has not yet evolved into the juggler he will become in the late nineteenth century, but she neutralizes gravity and renders him as weightless as any of the juggling clubs in his descendant’s legerdemain: he floats to heaven, wafted by divine agents.
The motif of soul-weighing is alluded to once in a version of the story of the jongleur produced in 1906, on one folio side of a book that features pseudomedieval
artwork to accompany the text. It depicts the juggler as a monk, about to be borne aloft by attendant spirits who have his arms in a death grip. To the side, a demon, clutching the deceased’s one-piece undergarment, gives us a black look (see Fig. 3.23).
The tumbler is not automatically sanctified. To gain salvation, his soul still requires intercession by way of the Madonna. Only after her intervention can her proxies truly spirit him away, and only after it does even the sky cease to be the limit: he reaches the empyrean.
In a quintessential Marian miracle tale, the Virgin saves the day, or at least the sinner, during the grace period between death and heaven or hell. She intervenes, not a moment too soon, to enfranchise from the devil a wrongdoer who has committed either a specific or a repeating pattern of transgressions. She can do so by serving as an eleventh-hour character witness, but often she steps in even when the malefactor seems unsalvageable. The story of the jongleur differs from this typical formula more than a jot and tittle. Although Mary performs her customary soteriological function by sparing an individual after death, the real miracle take place when she arranges for the same evildoer to be comforted during his mortal life—and so the medieval painter fittingly chooses for the sole illumination of the poem the scene with the “towel.” Our eyes are directed away from the celestial realm until the very end of the story. At that juncture, it intrudes epiphanically, so that we may not forget the afterworld to follow the present one, the hereafter to arrive after the here and now.
The protagonist of Our Lady’s Tumbler is a secular who has not been deeply monkified. In fact, he secularizes the liturgy more than the abbey monasticizes him.
He privatizes the customarily collective action of monks as they observe the canonical hours. In effect, he is an early adopter in embracing the practice of dedicating personal worship to Mary. In many miracle tales, individual devotion to the Virgin laicizes the regimen that was executed in the daily liturgical round of monks and many in the clergy. At each of the canonical hours, the devotee carries a special load for the Mother of God. This aping of monasticism by laypeople has come to be called the Little Office or the Hours of the Virgin. A story about a cleric of Pisa is the most famous one in which a worshiper sings the hours in private and in secret. After being browbeaten by his family into marrying, he is confronted in his wedding bed by Mary and motivated by her to return to her service. Such exclusive reverence, even more powerful when it took place before a Madonna, would become a potent feature of lay piety during the later Middle Ages.
We are never told of any specific act committed by the tumbler that would qualify as a major or even a minor sin—a delict or peccadillo. The jongleur seems instead to be the object of finger-pointing for the very nature of his premonastic profession and way of life. Another possible fly in the ointment would be his postmonastic inability to contribute to the abbey-wide team effort to express veneration in established ways of worship. In any case, his off-the-cuff liturgy turns out to outclass what the choir monks themselves manage to achieve. The similarities with other Marian miracle tales resume when Our Lady’s Tumbler depicts the Virgin interceding on behalf of this
Fig. 3.22 The archangel Michael and the act of psychostasis. Mural, fifteenth century. Burgos, Iglesia de San Nicolás de Bari. Image courtesy of Ramón Muñoz. All rights reserved.
Fig. 3.23 The juggler is lifted up by angels, rescued from the clutches of a demon.
Illustration by Henri Malatesta, 1906. Published in Anatole France, Le jongleur de Notre-Dame (Paris: F. Ferroud, 1906), 9.