Rome and Religion in the Medieval World

Studies in Honor of Thomas F.X. Noble

Valerie L. Garver, Owen M. Phelan, Valerie L. Garver, Owen M. Phelan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317061236
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Rome and Religion in the Medieval World provides a panoramic and interdisciplinary exploration of Rome and religious culture. The studies build upon or engage Thomas F.X. Noble's interest in Rome, especially his landmark contributions to the origins of the Papal States and early medieval image controversies. Scholars from a variety of disciplines offer new viewpoints on key issues and questions relating to medieval religious, cultural and intellectual history. Each study explores different dimensions of Rome and religion, including medieval art, theology, material culture, politics, education, law, and religious practice. Drawing upon a wide range of sources, including manuscripts, relics, historical and normative texts, theological tracts, and poetry, the authors illuminate the complexities of medieval Christianity, especially as practiced in the city of Rome itself, and elsewhere in Europe when influenced by the idea of Rome. Some trace early medieval legacies to the early modern period when Protestant and Catholic theologians used early medieval religious texts to define and debate forms of Roman Christianity. The essays highlight and deepen scholarly appreciation of Rome in the rich and varied religious culture of the medieval world.

Chapter 1

“Whatever Mystery May be Given to My Heart”: A Latent Image in Arator’s History of the Apostles

Giselle de Nie

In April and May of the year 544, while the Ostrogothic army was advancing upon Rome, a sizeable part of the city’s non-combatant population was held spellbound for four separate days in the church of St. Peter ad vincula (his chains were kept there as a relic¹) by the declamation of a poetic interpretation of the Acts of the Apostles.² The performer was its author, the poet Arator (480/490–546/550), a former high official at the Ostrogothic court at Ravenna who had transferred his services to the Church of Rome. And his poem, probably composed under the supervision, if not at the request, of Pope Vigilius (537–55), explained selected events in Acts as announcing the central doctrines of the faith, and highlighted the apostle Peter’s role in defining it and leading the Church community.

The medieval popularity of Arator’s History of the Apostles, with its glorifying emphasis upon St. Peter and Rome, is the reason I have selected it as my subject for this volume in honor of Tom Noble. For although he chose not to treat the ideology of what later became the papal state, the poem may well have helped to underpin what he has so admirably described as the rise of the “Republic of Saint Peter” in the period from 680 to 825.³ Since the Petrine dimension of Arator’s poem has already been fully examined by Paul-Augustin Deproost⁴ and Tom has recently explored the role of images,⁵ I decided to look at Arator’s imagery in his presentation of Acts’ events as manifesting the faith’s central doctrines.⁶ Each selected visible event, he writes, is a “figure”(figura) of a central doctrine of the faith or “mystery”“situated in heaven”(quam nubila gestant).⁷ And it is his intention to explain, “to open up through various figures”(variis aperire figuris) of other biblical events regarded as models of the faith’s central doctrines, “what was the face of things”(Quae fuerit rerum facies), in particular miracles.⁸

Already in the poem’s letter of dedication, my attention was caught by an intriguing phrase: he says that he “will open up, in alternating ways, what the text makes known and whatever mystery may be given to my heart”(Alternis reserabo modis, quod littera pandit / Et res si qua mihi mystica corde datur).⁹ Should this be understood as pointing to the view that his poesis—the process of finding the “mysteries” informing the events in Acts—coincides with something like ongoing divine revelation? For one of his models, the early fifth-century poet Paulinus of Nola, had come close to formulating such a view; as it were free-associating in various directions at once, he had developed an original kind of poetic theology.¹⁰ Considering Arator’s confession, I thus wondered whether I could perhaps discover—alongside the recognized biblical “figures”—traces of an original image below the explicit level, one that had occurred to the poet while writing the poem. And, indeed, I kept encountering fleeting glimpses of an as yet unnoticed tensive cluster of traditional images, never fully verbalized. As I hope to show in what follows, alongside the grandiose inspiring vision of Peter’s leadership of the Church, this underlying composite image appears to visualize the poet’s experience, or at least his conception of the experience, of a dynamic personal faith which he wished to impart to his audience in their crumbling world.

The Poem and its Context

The early sixth-century Ostrogothic revival of the Roman legacy was then being destroyed by the wars with the armies of the emperor Justinian in Constantinople, temporarily recovering wide stretches of the western Roman Empire. Arator’s poem has accordingly been described as a proclamation of a translatio imperii from the defunct visible empire of the ancient Romans founded by their mythical hero Aeneas, to the universal Church of Christ, founded and led by the apostle Peter, now represented by his successor, the city’s bishop.¹¹ Trying to give its listeners the courage to deal with the current dire situation, the poem even assured them that the apostle in heaven would prevent further war.¹²

Nothing is known of the poet’s whereabouts after his recital in 544. Despite the poem’s promises of the city’s rescue, Rome was captured and plundered by the Ostrogothic army two years later, in 546, and all of its inhabitants were deported. Later liberated by Justinian’s general Narses, the city and all Italy came under the heavy hand of the emperor’s Greek administrators—only to be confronted in 568, after Justinian’s death, with the invasion by the Germanic Longobards and, then left to its own devices, forced to find a modus vivendi with them.

Arator’s poem follows the precedent of earlier biblical epics in synthesizing his material and presenting it in an aesthetic guise to persuade his listeners.¹³ In certain respects echoing Sedulius’ early fifth-century Paschal Song¹⁴ which had woven the symbolic images into the happening events, it was also influenced by the didactic sermons of the Church Fathers, especially those of Augustine.¹⁵ Aside from the emphasis on Petrine leadership, the poem’s main themes have been listed as: the Christian way of life, belief in the Trinity, the Church as the anchor of the present and future life, and—especially—baptism as the access to all this.¹⁶

Modern scholars were long repelled by Arator’s didactic allegorizing, and the plentiful images he adduces around his material have been described by one as “a ‘transparent’ poetics of an astonishing baroqueness.”¹⁷ In the second half of the twentieth century, however, the poem finally began to be recognized and appreciated as—in many different ways—a last flowering of the Ostrogothic cultural revival in Italy under King Theodoric (489–526).¹⁸ Thus it has been described by Johannes Schwind as a “poetic meditation,”¹⁹ by Richard Hillier as a verse catechism about and for baptism, by Bruno Bureau as an oscillation between hymn, apology, epic, and versified sermon,²⁰ and most recently by Roger Green as all these things as well as a Roman-style panegyric for pope Vigilius,²¹ who had earlier been forcibly installed by Justinian’s general Belisarius against continuing local opposition. The fact that, a year after the declamation, when Vigilius had refused to align himself with the emperor’s politically motivated compromise view of the Trinity, he was dragged from the altar by imperial agents and taken to Constantinople to be browbeaten into submission is in stark contrast to the grandiose position claimed for him in Arator’s poem.

As Hillier demonstrated, alongside the Petrine focus, the notion of baptism as a hinge event in the Christian’s life keeps recurring in Arator’s presentation, also where there is no reference to it in the text of Acts. It has even been remarked that the poet seems to see Acts through the image of baptism rather than the other way around.²² Why dwell upon this when infant baptism had become the rule and there were so many other urgent concerns?²³ For one thing, the poem’s encouraging the heathen to be baptized indicates that the poet, and presumably also the pope, hoped for an expansion of the Church through the poem.²⁴ Its reiterated attempts to persuade the Jews to recognize their lack of understanding of the Christian message and to let themselves be baptized²⁵ indicates another reason for the prominence of the theme. It would have been especially relevant because, having enjoyed a protected status under the Ostrogothic regime, they tended to support the Gothic side in Justinian’s reconquista.²⁶

Since the poem was recited in the period between the traditional dates for baptism of Easter and Pentecost, however, Hillier argues that its prime purpose must have been to teach the just-baptized or the about-to-be-baptized the essentials of the faith.²⁷ Another reason for this focus, he adds, might be that the poet understood the infusion of the Holy Spirit at baptism as necessary for a true understanding of the Church’s “mysteries.”²⁸ The central “figure” of the “mystery” of baptism is Christ’s dying and resurrection. It is not mentioned in Acts itself, but Arator’s poem reminds its listeners of it at the beginning and refers to it several times subsequently.²⁹ The initiand re-enacts it through physical immersion and arising to a new life. Other figures or models of baptism in the poem include: the ascent of the “divine odor” of sacrifice, the ark saving all from the diabolic sea, the tongues of fire at Pentecost, the cure of the paralytic Aeneas, the resuscitation of Tabitha, Peter’s fishing, the passage through the Red Sea, circumcision, and the rejuvenation of the eagle or phoenix through the Sun’s fire.³⁰ As already indicated, other ostensibly incidental images also keep recurring around the notions of baptism and the baptismal font. I shall put them alongside each other to see what emerges.

Before undertaking this exploration, however, a word about my approach to the text. The traditional poetic—that is, imagistic—mode of Arator’s presentation is likely to have stimulated an affective receptivity that would open the listeners’ hearts. Because of this, the spiritually expanded visible events suggested by the poem could have been experienced as a brief foretaste of the “mysteries” traditionally “embodied” and enacted in the Church’s liturgy.³¹ For the deeper purpose of th...