Fra Angelico Ruminans Visualising Religious Experience in a Medieval Convent
Hans Geybels
Guidolino di Pietro was born near Castello di Vicchio in Tuscany ca. 1400. He died in Rome, 1455, where he was buried in the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. Today his full title is that of Blessed Fra Angelico Giovanni da Fiesole. The name Angelic Painter was given to him by the Dominican Provincial Domenico da Carella only ten years after he died.[1] Fra Angelico had entered the Dominican convent at Fiesole in 1407 where he started a career as an illuminator and miniaturist. In 1440 he was invited to Florence to decorate the new Convent of San Marco, which had just been appointed to his order and of which Cosimo de’ Medici was a munificent patron. Then, in 1445, Pope Eugenius IV invited Fra Angelico to Rome and set him to work in the Vatican, where he painted the frescoes of two chapels for the pope and his successor, Nicholas V Pope Eugenius is said to have offered Fra Angelico the place of Archbishop of Florence, an offer which he declined through modesty and devotion to his art.
Cell 1 of the dormitory in the convent of San Marco contains the famous fresco based on John 20:17: “Noli me tangere.” Mary Magdalene’s drapery is painted in light red ochre. Her mantle enfolds her kneeling figure. Her yellow ochre hair is gently spread over her mantle. Her face expresses no emotion, but she speaks with her outstretched arms and her hands. On the grass, painted in several tones of terre-verte, a divine Christ is depicted, gently curving his body and requesting her not to touch Him.[2] The divine is omnipresent, but if one is eager to touch it, it withdraws. It seems to demand respect for its transcendence.
The late professor Jos Decorte of the Higher Institute of Philosophy in Leuven observed that many interpretations of the medieval world have
become clouded in modern times. Concerning this mural painting, Decorte read an interpretation of an American feminist art historian - whose name is not mentioned in the article - who considered this fresco to be the ultimate proof of Jesus’ hate for women and of the anti-feminism of the medieval church, to which Fra Angelico belonged. After all, Jesus granted Thomas permission to put his hand into His side (John 20:24-29) but He does not allow Mary Magdalene to act in the same way. What is allowed for men is prohibited for women.[3]
Jos Decorte has much respect for feminist concerns in general but, he states, there is no need for such ‘foolish’ historical interpretations. For Decorte, this way of reading medieval data provokes three reactions. In the first place, people of the 21st century no longer understand the medieval world. Secondly, in our evaluation of the Middle Ages we stick to contemporary patterns of thought, which are influenced by our prejudices and thus are bound to lead to misunderstandings. Thirdly, those prejudices severely hinder research into the true nature of how our medieval ancestors dealt with religion and transcendence.[4]
In this contribution, we will try to do justice to the paintings of Fra Angelico by viewing his frescoes in their spiritual context, because we believe that his paintings in the convent of San Marco in Florence were meant to generate religious experience. To prove this, we will first examine the concept of religious experience in the Middle Ages, then we will study how religious experience was brought about through the method of rumination (ruminatio) on Christian literature, and finally we will demonstrate how this method of ruminatio is visualised in the paintings of the friar’s cells in the convent of San Marco.
How did people think about religious experience in the Middle Ages? Cloisters have always been regarded as schools, where religious life is the central theme. At the beginning of the 5th century, John Cassian (c. 360- c. 435), one of the founding fathers of Western monasticism who was acquainted with the Egyptian desert fathers and familiar with Eastern monasticism, founded some cloisters in the neighbourhood of Marseilles. In these cloisters he introduced the teachings contained in two important books of his written towards the end of his lifetime, namely the Institutes (Institutiones) and the 24 Conferences [Collationes). Both works are based on the rich monastic experience of the author. Cassian himself explained the difference between those books. He stated that the Institutes
are mainly concerned with what belongs to the outer man and the customs of the cloisters, whereas the Conferencesdeal with the training of the inner man and the perfection of the heart. The Institutesdeal with the rules governing monastic life and are illustrated by examples from the authors personal observations in Egypt and Palestine. The eight remaining books are devoted to the eight principal obstacles to perfection encountered by monks: gluttony, impurity, covetousness, anger, dejection, accidia(ennui), vanity, and pride. The Conferencescontain a record of the conversations of Cassian and his companion, Germanus, with the Egyptian solitaries, the subject being the inner life. These two works were thought of high value by his contemporaries and by several later founders of religious orders. For example, Benedict made use of Cassian in writing his Rule,and ordered selections from the Conferences,which he called a mirror of monasticism {speculum monasticum), to be read daily in the Benedictine monasteries.[5]
Cassian often speaks of cloisters as schools. To illustrate this, Cassian gives the example of the life of the holy man Paphnutius:
From the days of his youth he was committed to the cenobitic schools that after a short time among them he was enriched as much by his own spirit of submissiveness as by the knowledge he had acquired of all the virtues. Disciplined by humility and obedience, he kept a mortifying grip on the stirrings of his will and in this way every vice was extinguished and perfection was achieved in all those virtues which monastic practice and the most ancient teaching of the fathers had established. But he had a feverish urge to move ever higher and hurried forward to enter into the secrets of the desert {Conferences, III, i).[6]
The cloister is compared to a school, but not a school as the one that emerges in the 12th century, where theology is increasingly thought through a “rationalist” manner (“sola ratione”). What Pahnutius learns in the school of the cloister is knowledge concerning Christian virtues and the science of humility and obedience. This is the main difference with the other scholarly institutions of Antiquity. Primary school, then, consisted of scribere, legereand cogitare de litteris(e.g., learning Virgil’s works by heart). In a secondary school one took up the study of rhetoric {Confessions2,3,5 and 3,i,i).[7] In general the students had to read Cicero’s works
De inventione, Orator and De oratore. At the end of the course, prose works of high rhetorical interest (e.g. Sallustius) and the works of certain philosophers (e.g. Seneca) were studied. A training in liberal arts and in philosophy was the most prestigious training.[8] Rhetorical studies ended with the study of Ciceros philosophical dialogues (Hortensius).[9]
The teachings in the cloisters were not based on the intellectual competence of the teachers. The main goal was to follow the teachers, who were masters in spiritual life. The monk did not have to understand what the master said, but had to follow what the master did. Learning something had less to do with comprehension than with experience. Cassian is very clear about this:
You will be teaching something acquired not so much by reading as by the sweat of experience {Conferences, XIV, 17).[10]
The school of the cloister was a school of experience. Even reading the Bible remained senseless if the monk could not convert what was written into his own existential experience. Experience not only brought the monk to know the things told in the Scriptures, but anticipated what they were meant to convey":
We find all these sentiments expressed in the psalms. We see very clearly, as in a mirror, what is being said to us and we have a deeper understanding of it. Instructed by our own experiences we are not really learning through hearsay but have a feeling for these sentiments as things that we have already seen. They are not like things confided to our capacity for remembrance but, rather, we bring them to birth in the depths of our hearts as if they were feeling naturally there and part of our being. We enter into their meaning not because of what we read but because of what we have experienced earlier (Confessions, X, 11).[11]
The cloister as a school is also one of the main ideas of the anonymous Master of the Rule and of Benedict of Nursia (c. 480-543). Later on the idea was spread by an admirer of Benedict, Pope Gregory the Great (540- 604). In his Dialogues, Gregory states that learning happens through following living examples and not through rational cognitive processes.
Gregory’s Dialogues are filled with examples which deserve admiration and, above all, imitation.[12] Therefore, one of the Dialogues is completely devoted to the life and times of Benedict.
Religious experience in the Middle Ages has to be understood as the Scriptures and authorities becoming existential experience and daily life receiving sense through these same Scriptures and authorities. This theology reached its apogee in the works of Bernard of Clairvaux (1090- 1153). Bernard opened the third homily in his book On the Canticle of Canticles as follows: “Hodie legimus in libro experientiae.” (Today we read in the book of experience.) What he means is the book of the existential experience of each listener. He proceeds by telling his audience that not everyone will understand what he is going to explain because they are not experienced. His exegesis of the Canticle becomes a metaphor of religious life as a meeting place of one’s own experience and the experience of the Christian community. Bernard invites his brothers to ruminate on what they heard in sermons because in this kind of meditation the life of our spirit is situated. On various occasions he incites his monks to ruminate on psalms intimately and jubilantly. His friend, William of Saint Thierry (c. 1085-c. 1148), stimulates rumination because it helps to penetrate into the deeper meanings of Scripture.[13] This is precisely what religious experience is in the context of medieval monasticism.
But how is this kind of religious experience brought about? The key term for understanding the method has already been mentioned: the Latin verb ruminare. In classical Latin, the verb literally means to ruminate, to chew the cud, but some authors (Cicero, Varro, Tertullian, Sym- machus) already used the concept in a metaphorical way. In those days, the concept meant to think over, to revolve in the mind.'[14] The meaning of this concept in monastic circles becomes immediately clear if one realises that the methods of meditation were concentrated on the words of classical authors, of authorities, and of Scripture (the Word!).[15]
In the Middle Ages, there were two ways in which the Scriptures could be read: the lectio divina of the monasteries and the sacra pagina of the schools. Originally, these terms were synonyms but since the rise of the schools in the 12th century, each concept took 0n1 a different meaning. The schools preferred the terminology of pagina because they wanted to look at the text in an objective way, the text as material for study. In a cloister, the reader had to learn to be existentially involved in reading the Scripture. Both in schools and cloisters, the activity of reading was holy {sacra, divina), but they had a different goal. Scholastic lectio points to quaestio and disputatio, leading to scientia, whereas monastic lectio tends towards meditatio and oratio, leading to sapiential
Monastic meditation consisted of the continuous repetition of a bible phrase. The method is often compared to the absorption of spiritual food {sapientia - sapere), and the vocabulary to explain this is borrowed from nutrition and digestion, particularly the digestion which is called rumination. In his book De miraculis (1,20), Peter the Venerable (c. 1092-1156) praises a monk whose mouth continuously ruminated sacred words (“Os sine requie sacra verba ruminans”). In the vita of John of Gorze (t976), it is told that the continuous rumination of the psalms sounded like the buzzing of bees (“Et in morem apis Psalmos tacito murmure continuo revolvens”). One has to ruminate on the read passage, by constantly returning to the text, also during the hours of manual labour and of silence. The ultimate goal of rumination is to taste the words, to assimilate one’s life to their content. The activity is like prayed reading or meditative prayer whereby the ruminated words activate the spiritual incorporation of the text. For this purpose the seventh century monk, Defensor, from the monastery of Ligugé, wrote the Liber scintillarum (the book of sparks), a moral florilegium of 81 chapters combining very short aphorisms from the Bible and the Church Fathers.'9
Of course, this method had consequences for the religious psychology of the devout. Cassian and Gregory did not have in mind the intellectual perfection of the monks but the lived experience comprised in the texts. Rumination occupied and involved the whole person and related the person to the history of salvation. It was as if the words came out of the monk’s own heart. Once more, John Cassian is our guide[16]:
Then indeed, the Scriptures lie ever more clearly open to us. They are revealed, heart and sinew. Our experience not only brings us to know them but actually anticipates what they convey. The meaning of the words comes through to us not just by way of commentaries but by what we ourselves have gone through. Seized of the identical feelings in which the psalm was composed or sung we become, as it were, its author. We anticipate its idea instead of following it. [...]
We see very clearly, as in a mirror, what is being said to us and we have a deeper understanding of it (Confessions, X, II).2‘
Beautiful examples of rumination are two books by John Ruusbroec (1293-1381), both completely based on one evangelical sentence: “See, the bridegroom cometh; go out to meet Him” (Matt 25:6) in The Spiritual Espousalsand “The Lord led the just back along the right ways and showed him the realm of God” (Wisdom 10:10) in The Realm of Lovers.22
Before we shed some light on Fra Angelico, let us go over what has been stated thus far. Religious experience is a key concept to understand religious, and particularly monastic, life in the Middle Ages. The concept means that a Christian should live according to the Scriptures and authorities as if having written these sacred texts themselves. Since these sacred texts are nothing other than reports of people with experiences, religious people now have to turn the reported experiences into their own existential experiences. The appropriate method to achieve this goal is the rumination upon the sacred texts. The continuous repetition of a sacred verse effects the experience of what is told in it. With this in mind we are now able to see how Fra Angelico is able to deal with these theological presuppositions. In the history of art Fra Angelico is correctly considered to be one of the greatest artists of the Italian Quattrocento, but in order to understand his art appropriately a proper comprehension of the theological context is indispensable.
First we will discuss the place where the frescoes were painted and then consider the iconographic patterns. The frescoes in question are situated in the north corridor of the dormitory and in some of the friars cells in San Marco. The place is of considerable importance because a complete theology was developed with respect to the monk’s cell. William of Saint Thierry’s (c. 1085-c. 1148) so-called Golden Letter (Epis- tola adfratres de Monte Dei)to a group of Carthusians was an extremely popular document because it had always been ascribed to his friend,
Bernard of Clairvaux.[17] In §151, William insists on the poor design of the cell because our earthly existence is nothing more than a temporary pilgrimage. Therefore, the monk should build a provisional tent instead of a permanent house (“non domos ad habitandum, sed tabernacula ad deserendum”). A luxurious exterior fits ill with a soul that tends towards an interior life (§154: “Sed et intentum interioribus animum magis decent inculta omnia et neglecta exteriora”).
In a few beautiful sentences in §29, William unfolds the central idea of what a friars cell must be like in order not to become a prison or a tomb to a living man[18]:
For as the same Apostle said, “There are some that have the outward shape of piety, but deny the power thereof.” (2 Tim 3,5) Whosoever of you had not this in his conscience, showed it not in his life, practised it not in his cell, he should be called not solitary but desolate; nor is his cell a cell to him, but a prison and a dungeon. For he is desolate and alone indeed, with whom God is not, who is not free in God. For solitude, and prison, are names of wretchedness; whereas a cell must not in any respect be the enclosure of necessity, but the dwelling-place of peace, a door that is closed; not a hiding place, but a secret place.1’
By means of a clever etymology, William declares that friars actually live in heaven (caelum) rather than in a cell (cella): “habitantes in caelis potius quam in cellis” (§31). Dwelling in heaven or in a cell are related. According to him both cella and caelum are derived from celare, to hide, to keep silent (§32):
For when in the cell heavenly things are continually done, heaven is made very nigh to the cell by likeness of mystery, by affection of piety, and by accomplishing of a like work; and when the spirit prayed, or it may be forsaked the body, it is then no longer or hard way from cella to caelum,from cell to heaven.[19]