CHAPTER VI CHIARAVALLE AND FEMINISM IN THE SOME COME three miles outside the Porta Ticinese, to the south of the city of Milan, there stands a deserted monastery that is at once a shrine and a sepulchre, the shrine in Lombardy of S. Bernard, for he founded it, and the sepulchre of one of the most amazing heresies that have ever sought to destroy Holy Church. The place is well worth a visit, and on a spring or autumn afternoon is still fair enough to attract us for its own sake; it is called Chiaravalle. When S. Bernard was on his way back from the Council of Pisa in 1135 he came on his way to Milan, and they would have made him Archbishop, as would many another city; but he would not, for he was a monk and the chief of his Order, and his home was at Clairvaux. Nevertheless, looking about, he spied the little village of Rovegnano, and liking the place, and doubtless besought by the Milanese to do something for them, he consented to found there a monastery of his Order and to name it in memory of his home. Thus Rovegnano became Chiaravalle. We know that figure, the one really divine presence in all the years of the twelfth century, S. Bernard, who for us at least is less a mystic than a man of action, a missionary rather than a monk, a true captain of the Church. We see him "in ejus clarissima et carissima valle" at Clairvaux; we see him overcome Abelard, and send Louis VII. on his disastrous crusade; we see him toiling over the hard and endless roads of Europe, and we know his songs. Well, here at the gates of Milan is an abbey which he himself founded and named after that valley bright and beloved which was his home. In 1159, the date of the foundation of Chiaravalle, the Cistercian Order was already more than sixty years old. The first branch, the first reform of the great Order which S. Benedict had founded, and which had in some sort saved and civilised Europe, was that of Cluny, celebrated for its school and designed for that "luxury for God," the splendour of His services. Cluny had been established in 910, and nearly two hundred years later, in 1098, we see the reaction from all that it had especially desired in the foundation of Citeaux in the desert of Beaune by Robert, Cluniac Abbot of Molesme. The Cistercians, as they were called, desired above all things "to be poor with Christ, who was poor"; they did not give themselves to learning, they refused every luxury for their churches, their desire was to live by manual labour, to be poor and humble, to possess nothing either for themselves or for their house or for their Order. The "importunate poverty of Citeaux" became a proverb, and like the same claim of the Franciscans later, was a rock of offence to all who were not their brethren. Indeed, so greatly did this poverty offend the time that Citeaux, in spite of the saintliness of its third Abbot, the Englishman Stephen Harding, was on the verge of collapse and ruin when in 1113 S. Bernard knocked at the door. Three years later, at the age of twenty-five, he was sent with twelve brethren to found the monastery he called Claire Vallée, which we know as Clairvaux, where he lies buried before the altar of Our Lady, as indeed is most fitting, for was it not he who dared to add the three magnificent vocatives at the end of the Salve Regina ?— O clemens, O pia, O dulcis Virgo Maria ! Ut digni efficiamur promissionibus Christi. The Cistercian Order, established firmly by S. Bernard, was thus an austere institution vowed to poverty and simplicity of life: to this Order the Abbey of Chiaravalle belonged.1 Barbarossa took the place under his protection, and it had many privileges from other emperors. The Milanese, too, were devoted to it, and many of the rich families in the city made it gifts; but it chiefly flourished. by the industry of the monks, who cultivated the land. they had drained, so that in the thirteenth century it possessed some 400 acres of land. It thus, it might seem, proved false to the intention of its founder and the rule of its Order, so that we are not surprised to learn that presently it became famous not for its industry and agriculture alone, but for its learning, and was visited for this by the highest personages in the country, who were used to sojourn there. Among these was the Archbishop Ottone Visconti, who died in the monastery, where, too, the flower of the Milanese nobility went to meet Beatrice d' Este when she came to marry Galeazzo Visconti. Indeed, the place was so entrenched in the traditions of Milan that it was here the archbishops were 1 The inscription on the door between the church and the cloister may still be read : "An. Grat. MCXXXV X1 Kl. Febb. constructus e hoc monasteriu a btō Bnardo-abbe clave vel MCCXXI cōsecrata e ecclă ista a do. Henrico Mediolanensi archiepō vi nonas Maii in onōē scẽ mar careval." That is to say, " In the year of grace 1135, on twentysecond January was built this monastery by Blessed Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux. In 1221 was consecrated this church by the Lord Henry, Archbishop of Milan, on 2nd May, in honour of S. Mary of Clairvaux.” used to sleep on the night before they made their solemn entry into Milan by the Porta Ticinese. Such was the monastery of Chiaravalle which S. Bernard had founded. In the end of the thirteenth century, however, a very strange adventure befell it. Lombardy was in that century the unfortunate home of a host of heretics, among them the Oriental sect of the Manichees, who asserted a double Cause in the creation of the world, a good and an evil. Among these sectaries there appeared one day a woman with a child, which shortly afterwards died. It was said of this woman that she was a fugitive nun from her native land, which she had left because a monastic life did not agree with her amorous inclinations. Her name was Guglielmina,1 and she was a Bohemian: she claimed to be the daughter of the King of Bohemia. For a time she lived at Porta Nuova, then at S. Stefano in Borgagna, then at S. Pietro all' Orto. She was known as extraordinarily good to the poor, and it seemed as though all her joy was in comforting the afflicted; indeed, she appeared so honest and her charity so great that she entered the best Milanese society, made the acquaintance of the most distinguished families, of priests, of nuns and monks, and at last of those of Chiaravalle. She was also received by the Suore Umiliate, the most exclusive company in Milan, and she was seen to be particularly friendly with a certain Andrea Saramita, who had a sister and a daughter in the Umiliate. No one seems to have aught but good to say of her; yet, and here is the astonishment, this woman was a most pestilent heretic, suffering the most horrible delusions, insane, and last but not least, a kind of thirteenth-century 1 Wilhelmina. It has been asserted by the author of the Annales of Colmar that she was an Englishwoman: he emphasises her beauty: but she was not English. Cf. Muratori, Antichità Italiana (Milano, 1751), tom. iii. p. 309, diss. 60. The reference is wrongly given in Milman, Hist. of Lat. Christ. feminist or suffragette." Just as the Manichees had asserted that God was both evil and good, so she taught that He was male and female; and therefore she sought to establish a woman Pope over against the successor of S. Peter, and a priesthood of women over against the successors of the Apostles. She attempted this, and in a sense she achieved it in the city of Milan in the thirteenth century what she taught was still more blasphemous and obscene, yet wonderful to relate she died in her bed, unharmed, though she must have smelt furiously of the faggot. That price, however, was paid later by her woman Pope and others. But let us return to Guglielmina, for her story is like a monstrous fairy tale.1 Briefly, what she asserted was as follows: She declared, first, that she herself, daughter of Constance, Queen of Bohemia, was the Holy Spirit incarnate in the feminine sex. Secondly, that even as the Archangel Gabriel had announced to Mary the Incarnation of the Divine Word, so the Archangel Raphael had announced to Queen Constance the Incarnation of the Holy Spirit, and this on Whitsunday, on which day also, a complete year after, she, Guglielmina, had been born. She asserted, thirdly, that as Christ was true God and true Man, so she was true God and true Woman (true Man in the feminine sex), and that she had been born for the salvation of Jews, Saracens and Heretics, even as Christ had been born for the salvation of Christians. Fourthly, that she must die according to the flesh, but not according to her Divine nature, even as Christ. 1 Muratori (ubi cit.) examined all the contemporary documents in the Bib. Ambrosiana: "Il Processo autentico d' essa, formato l' Anno 1300 e la Storia de' suoi errori, compilata del Puricelli, e scritta a penna." The Processo is entitled "Contra Guilelmam Bohemam, vulgo Guilielminam, ejusque Sectam." Cf. also F. Tocco, Guglielma Bohema e i Guglielmiti (Roma, 1901). |