Charisma and the Transformation of Western Culture 12th to 13th Centuries

Abstract

The academic discussion of charisma takes two major voices as the point of departure: Max Weber and St. Paul. In both areas, sociology and religion, charisma is seen as a quality of persons. My argument is that entire cultures can be suffused by this force, and that social life, education, and modes of expression can be bearers and transmitters of charismatic force. I approach the argument conceptually, drawing on a remarkable passage in Goethe’s autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit. What Goethe calls “the demonic” is charisma conceived as a force that can penetrate, unpredictably, either natural phenomena or persons. To these I add institution, cultures, and structures of government. The charisma of larger structures, like personal charisma, has a life-cycle, charisma in its cultural structuring being as unstable as in its personal embodiment. The idea opens cultural transformations to analysis. Clifford Geertz has provided a model. The sea-changes that transformed western European culture from the twelfth to the thirteenth century show us the end of a life-cycle of charismatic culture, and the transition to intellectual or textual culture. Charisma moved out of the realm of the lived and expressed social forms and into art and artifice, rationalizing philosophy, theology, liturgy and other forms of Christian discourse (sermons). Three voices from the later thirteenth century observe this development closely—the loss of charisma as a political–social–cultural force—and lament the loss.

1. Introduction

Historians of the Middle Ages have mapped the changes from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries with a variety of concepts: the move from an open to a closed society1; from humanism to scholasticism2; from monasticism to Scholastic humanism from Romanesque to Gothic3; from a tolerant to a persecuting society4; from a charismatic to a textual or intellectual culture.5 A persistent strain of thought makes the twelfth century a Renaissance—a term which has a decorative and popularizing effect on thinking about the age, but is misleading since it favors a progressive view of development, and so obscures the character of the period from the tenth to the twelfth centuries.6 The term inherited from Charles Homer Haskins presupposes darkness, stagnation, and intellectual sleep preceding the twelfth-century awakening,7 and too often has relieved the historian of the need to understand and explain the culture, religious and secular, which the twelfth-century transformation superseded.

In this essay, I return to the concept of a charismatic culture and the transformation to a textual or intellectual culture. My point of departure is a reconceptualizing of “charismatic”. The conventional approaches to that term focus on individual charisma. The two dominant voices are St. Paul and Max Weber, who locate the subject in the context of Christian moral thought, charismata, gifts from God (St. Paul) or leadership roles (Weber).8 Weber extended the thought of Christian theologians to social and political contexts, centering charisma on persons who possess it, a quality of an exceptional or chosen individual manifested especially in domination (Herrschaft).9

Some of the obscurities of the concept thus understood are illumined by deriving it from a metaphysical grounding adequate to a much broader view, one that takes in the variety of irrational, powerful, contradictory qualities shared among the three areas in which it manifests, the individual, society, and nature. The conventional bases of study, explicit or implicit, are religion, Platonic metaphysics, or human psychology/biology, all narrowly focused on the charismatic person.

To broaden the view of charisma, I call on two voices, Goethe and Clifford Geertz. Both open a superpersonal perspective on the subject—Goethe’s idea of “the Demonic”, formulated in his autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit, and Clifford Geertz’s study of charisma as a determinant in societies and governing orders.10 The idea of charisma grounded in society and culture, sheds light on the transformation of Western culture that took place in the course of the twelfth century.

2. Metaphysics of Charisma

Charisma lends itself to analysis as an abstract concept, as do, for instance, truth and beauty or good and evil. While these manifest in people and things, in works of art, and human actions, they are also understandable as ideas apart from any personal or social context. In the case of charisma, however, it is hard to imagine it as an idea separated from its embodiment. No handbook of philosophy includes an article on the subject. But I find a profound model positing a transcendental force of which charisma is a single aspect, in Goethe’s autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit (Part 4, Bk. 20).11 Goethe loosely defined an extra-theocentric metaphysical force, manifesting in a variety of forms, personal charisma among them, but far more extensive in its working. It is a force in nature and human life that he calls “the Demonic”.12 He presents it in a casual, almost conversational tone as an insight that develops gradually over a lifetime of seeking the “Transcendental” (Das Übersinnliche) in nature, society and the individual.13 Searching around the peripheries and interstices of religion, he eventually discovered a strong presence which had no place as part of religion, though it seemed most closely related to it. The term “demonic” is misleading, since for the modern reader, it inevitably conjures demons, devils, evil, and the diabolical.14 That is far from Goethe’s intention, which is to assert a metaphysical force alongside but apart from God, gods, devils, and angels, prior to embodied metaphysical forces.

Goethe’s term has a complicated derivation.15 He calls it Demonic in “the sense of the ancients” (a tutoring spirit, Socrates’s Daimon), and understands it as a metaphysical force like God, angels, and devils, though he does not personify it as a supernatural being. Goethe himself hesitates to call it by name as a concept or designate it with a single word. It takes some qualification to bring its intended meaning into focus.

Goethe envisions a force or energy or spirit of a kind outside of or alongside conventional moral spheres. Ludwig Otto’s idea of “the numinous” is a helpful comparison in defining a metaphysical power, aligned with religious experience, though separable from any object and embodiment. The “Numinous” asserts itself as a mysterious presence, felt but not seen, registering in the awe and fear of the subject—Otto’s term for this response is mysterium tremendum. Numinous has the advantage of shedding the false implication of a realm of demons positioned alongside the divine and the diabolical.16 Otto locates the numinous close to the sublime, both of them transcendental qualities; however, both are more focused—the numinous on things divine, the sublime on things aesthetic. Other terms that might have influenced Goethe’s thinking on the Demonic are Geist and Genius and the ideas associated with them in the second half of the eighteenth century.17 Both have a primary reference to an individual quality of mind but also extend to much broader realms, as in Zeitgeist, Volksgeist, and Weltgeist. Genius likewise was, in Herder’s usage, a quality not just of gifted individuals, but of particular eras and ethnic groups. He imagined ancient Hebrew society as united by a common Genius or Volksgeist; likewise pre-Christian Germanic society. He also envisioned contemporary (mid-18th century) Germany in a position to end the barrenness of their post-Thirty-Years’ War culture, conflict-torn and woefully dependent on French culture, and to institute a new culture consistent with the national Geist of the Germans:

Keeping in mind Herder’s Historical understanding of cultures and national literatures, it becomes apparent that in calling for a new German genius, he is in effect asking for nothing less than a complete renewal of German language and culture.

(Nicholls 2014, p. 103)

Goethe no doubt had in mind in defining the Demonic some similarly comprehensive influence in analogy to Herder’s Geist. Its qualities may include some features of, but are more extensive and contradictory than, the numinous or a national genius. If a spirit (Geist), then it is a creature of paradox—I am paraphrasing Goethe in Dichtung und Wahrheit—resisting enclosure in a concept (which presupposes consistency). It runs contrary to the natural order of the world. It seems to belong in the moral realm, though it has no consistent disposition. It is like Good and Evil, though indifferent to both. It motivates action, like Good and Evil, but is more often than not in rebellion against the moral and social order, now disruptive and transgressive, now radically innovative and constructive. The Demonic destroys and builds, overwhelms, and pacifies. It is a power with great force but no logic. It is awe-inspiring, even terrifying. It can operate through the forces of nature, where it manifests in radical upheavals, such as earthquakes, volcanoes, and storms at sea. Warfare has aspects of the Demonic, though Goethe never mentions it in this context. War has the supra-rational, extra-moral aspect of the Demonic, the destructive and constructive potential, the terrifying and the inspiring force. Like warfare, the Demonic is indifferent to human life and as likely to assert itself in the rescue of life as the destruction of it.

War and the Demonic also share a quality stressed by Goethe: randomness. It is something like chance, unpredictable, but also something like providence, since it shows signs of foresight. The boundaries and limits of human nature are no barrier to it. It contracts time and expands space. “It seemed at home in the impossible and despised whatever was attainable”. He implies that the ancients had an understanding of this force—something like ananké, forced destiny, necessity, fatedness18—but Western Christianity no longer does.

These few comments summarize Goethe’s general explanation of the Demonic, which, however, seems to darken more than illuminate the phenomenon. It is a numinous force with no consistent qualities—mention one quality and the next cancels it, as often subversive as constructive, and acting beyond human capacities. A comment by Kirk Wetters captures this paradoxical character of the idea, real but inscrutable: “The demonic in Goethe is an essentially empirical and experiential category of inexplicability” (Demonic History, p. 15). A useful point of comparison is gravity—an invisible force, ontologically opaque. Gravity, though invisible and nowhere experienceable apart from its effects, acts in nature on physical objects. Its effects range from vast and cosmic to local. It is a force with no moral valence, attraction and repulsion being neutral forces.19

3. The Demonic Embodied

It becomes more tangible in what follows. This awesome, nameless phenomenon was terrifying for Goethe (furchtbar, unfasslich). He sought shelter from it, he says, recasting it in a visible presence (Bild), as in natural phenomena or in historical figures. Projected into personalities, the Demonic shows its relatedness to, if not identity with, charisma. Manifesting in things and creatures, it can appear in many forms, says Goethe, non-living or living, bodily, natural, supernatural. It takes particularly curious forms in animals. Unfortunately, he leaves this unexplained. But it is strangest, most frightening, when it appears as a dominant, not just an occasional, quality of an individual. Embodied in persons, the Demonic seems identical with charisma. It does not appear necessarily in people who are particularly intelligent or talented. Kindness is rare. A mediocre mind and a raw character do not exclude demonic force; perhaps they encourage it. People with this particular gift project power and command and dominate others in ways unthinkable for those not subject to them. They can even influence forces of nature, and here Goethe points enticingly to magic and preternatural realms—man commanding nature, nature obeying—without entering them.

The Demonic embodied in a person resists morality and logic in its actions. Enlightened, reasoned thought can accomplish nothing in opposition to the person enspirited by the Demonic. Those not in its spell may expose lies and deceptions in the charismatic person, but to no avail; they are outside of moral judgments, immune to criticism. The masses are drawn to them.20 They exude an enormous lust for life (Lebenslust), boundless confidence in themselves, the gift of attracting and winning over friends or enemies, and they are strongly attractive to the opposite sex. At the end of its nature nearest to individual experience, is charm, seductive, winning power, and the power to persuade, to override individual will. Here, the demonic clearly overlaps with charisma. At its farthest end it has the power of historical transformation.

4. Charisma as an Agent of Historical Change

Goethe recognized the working of this paradoxical force in the great upheavals of history and represented it in his play Egmont (1788). He refashioned the historical character, Count Egmont, hero and martyr of the Dutch wars of independence from Spain in the late sixteenth century, into a charismatic, youthful freedom fighter, with boundless self-confidence, immense Lebenslust, and the gift of attracting and binding a whole people and individuals, particularly young women, to his person.21 In Egmont, the qualities of a charismatic personality converged with a revolutionary mission to redirect the fate of his country; a martyr to be sure, but that was a fate that, in Goethe’s version, increased his power to effect the transformation of Dutch history and culture. Charisma has been well described as “the specifically creative revolutionary force of history”.22 Goethe’s Egmont is his best fictional or dramatic representation of that characteristic. Napoleon was the historical character in his own time who best embodied the Demonic.23 Goethe’s Demonic is predictive of revolutionary movements in which a single man places himself in a position to control an entire country, as with Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler in the 20th century and Donald Trump in the 21st century.

5. Charisma as a Quality of Culture

But while individuals embody the Demonic at single points on the full range of the phenomenon, it is broader. It manifests in the operations of nature, as do gravity and magnetism. It posits a charisma-like force that distributes itself unpredictably in nature (earthquakes, majestic mountains), individuals, and cultures.

Charisma can suffuse an entire society in a particular phase of its historical life-cycle. Imagine charismatic force as a super-personal principle of organization and a driver of behavior circulating through a society, deployed and dominant in many areas, as a mode of expression, performance, and action governing the manners and behavior, especially of its aristocracy, from whom it filters down to other classes.

Emile Durkheim’s idea of “force” in totemistic cultures can help understand this societally functioning charisma. Durkheim’s ideas apply at the level of primitive religious beliefs and totemistic cultures. But force in Durkheim’s sense inhabits cultural beliefs into the modern period, moving from totemic spirits to religion to science.24 What enspirits and enlivens a culture at this primitive stage, says Durkheim, is “a kind of anonymous and impersonal force” that exists in each creature, constructed object, plant, animal and person, but identical to none of them. If it is called a god in a given society, then “it is an impersonal god, without name, without history, immanent in the world, diffused in a numberless multitude of things”. This force of sacredness inhabiting things and people and moving them to act in ways which are a manifestation of that force is proto-religion or “pre-animist religion”. The force is not given by a god; it is a kind of substratum of religion prior to embodied gods. If the sun, moon and mountains are worshipped, then not because they are gods but because they participate in the force, whatever name it might be called by.

This is an illuminating parallel to the Demonic, also a force that infuses individuals and societies. It pushes them into behavior and actions that are now ordering, now disordering, that behave with a stringently focused intentionality, but also with a kind of absurd, quirky irregularity. In social charisma, the force resides in the institutions, their rules and customs, and their social and ethical values. At the height of its influence, it dominates and organizes behavior in all segments of society. The charisma of the individual is freer, magnifies personal power, inspires a penchant for revolutionary action, and is consistently exceptional and extraordinary, at least in its early phases.

Human action and expression in charisma-infused societies operate in a modality we can call “heroic”, though not heroic in our conventional sense restricted to courage and combat. It includes athletics, education, oratory, religion, intellectual life, poetry, art, friendship, and the erotic. “Heroic” in the context of charismatic social and political structures refers to a heightened energy of action in any and all public activities, in each of which there is a communal and individual striving to excel, to dominate. This striving asserts itself in conflict and competition. The ambition to excel and to win is the driver of activity, the motive that establishes hierarchies of quality. Passivity cannot establish quality; meditation and writing, monastic life, cannot play in the same competitive field. “Heroic” means action and not reflection; presence and not representation; performance and not written texts. The living body and physical presence are the mediators of cultural values and the works of art of charismatic cultures. Admirable action happens when the forces at work are successfully exerted to the maximum. The purpose of that heightened energy of action is to magnify. Widely instilled in individuals and cultivated by social values is an urge to greatness and grandiosity, to victory, fame and conquest, be it in the small or the great affairs of life.25 That striving, once gratified, settles into the constant urge to dominate. What is won must be defended; you possess only what you can defend.

Common to all areas in this heroic modality is the glorifying of the lived moment, the mastery of the kairos, and the elegant or heroic response to challenge and crisis. In the reality of warfare, that means every thrust and parry, on which life and death hang. Every stroke of the sword happens in the mode of a crisis, the kairos. Heroic literature adapts this dynamic by making each event a challenge, moving the hero from one test and challenge to the next. Kairos is the central moment, or series of moments, in the literature in a heroic modality, be it heroic in our usual genre sense, or romantic. What the modern world has in moments of poems and books that inspire and illuminate, a charismatic culture had in individual acts of courage, wisdom, cleverness, deceit, love and loyalty—acts experienced or remembered, conveyed by communal tradition, or maybe even occasionally by writing.

A help in envisioning the embracing character of a charismatic culture is a short essay by Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Agon of Homer”. Competition, he says, is a basic principle of Hellenic culture. Every human talent must develop and exert itself in competitive struggle. Loss in public competition, political or athletic, was a serious, sometimes tragic matter. Success is glory. Nietzsche speaks of “the deification of success”. Odysseus wins the weapons of Achilles in public debate with Ajax by superior eloquence, whereas Ajax merited the prize by warrior prowess. Ajax responds to the defeat by killing himself. Pindar supplies Nietzsche with good examples of victory in the games as fame and glory, and of loss as tragedy.26

In an agonal culture, conflict undergirds order; combat and conflict are presuppositions of order. Geertz finds this principle powerfully at work in the kingship of Morocco which ended in the late nineteenth century: “Political life is a clash of personalities everywhere…struggle was looked upon not as something in conflict with the order of things…but as its purest expression. Society was agonistic—a tournament of wills”.

It is easy to forget how provocative humanistic ideals, such as “the perfect human” (homo perfectus), the dignity of man, freedom of the will, and “the best knight,” are. The static idea gains life only by vigorous, sometimes mortal, struggle. All idealizing of the human presupposes desperate conflict with winners and losers.

Power works through an established order; it bends individuals and classes to its strictures, as though exercised by an anonymous and communal will (which will ordinarily be called tradition, the mos maiorum). The structures of society govern the citizens in their manners and actions rather than the reverse. That the source of this awesome power and influence might be beyond the self-interest of a ruling class is addressed nowhere in Geertz’s work,27 but like effects in societies as different as the three on which he focuses call for reflection on a common cause. Here is where the Demonic is a useful tool of analysis.

6. Monarchy and Lavish Display

A charismatic culture28 is most in evidence in a monarchy, where the monarch—the center and the pawn of power structures—must maintain in their own person the authority and the “sacredness of sovereign power” (Geertz). That force filters through the hierarchy and asserts itself in many aspects of public life. It does not depend on the personality of an individual king. Inborn merit—wisdom, courage, wit—would be a great help to those rulers who must constantly assert charismatic authority but an unreliable means to sustain continuity over the course of a particular dynasty. The individual ruler need not always possess personal charisma, but he must appear to rule through it. Therefore, the gigantic and horrendous spectacle of magnificence and prodigality of dynasties, especially in their decline, meant to project charisma intact and strong, however weak or feeble-minded the monarch, and thus reinforce waning authority.29

Appearing to possess this quasi-magical, quasi-divine force is a strong element in maintaining power, but the ruler is in fact its subject, dependent on a symbolic superstructure that asserts the ruler’s power. Lavish display combined with the successful assertion of power is an obligatory stabilizing force of monarchy.

Geertz gives three examples of societies where forces outside of individuals impose certain kinds of behavior on subjects, and where the ruler happens to be the first focal point of royal authority, the “center”, to use Geertz’s term, from which that energy radiates:

• Elizabeth I of England, governed by the virtues of chastity, love, beauty, and pure religion, obligated to put these virtues on lavish display;
• The King of Java, in the fourteenth century, reshaping his court into a model of the god-ordained cosmos, which then asserts cosmic force in the political order;
• The King of Morocco in the late nineteenth century, in all his power and wealth pathetically subservient to the requirements of charisma-projection.

In these cases, charisma takes on an existence of its own—it must be nourished and displayed, and it uses individuals.

7. Charismatic Cultural Forms in the Middle Ages

The approach to defining medieval political and social culture in their charismatic self-representation has produced a rich body of scholarship on the symbolism and rituals of power.30 The forces enspiriting a ruling aristocracy function within the kind of aesthetic magical poetical thinking that also informs “charisma”. But these studies have made only casual, or no, use, of that term.31 Geertz’s approach is a breakthrough. It is about charisma infusing a society, not just driving an individual.

The monarch may be the center of a society governed by charismatic force, but its diffusion is broad. Some select examples from the Middle Ages prior to the thirteenth century can firm up that claim.

The forces driving a ruling aristocracy towards spectacle call forth extravagant forms of display to assert superhuman power. The studies mentioned in n. 29 are not concerned with the charismatic effects of court rituals in the psychology and politics of aristocratic society. These remain a promising topic.32 Geertz’s sources are located in the area of visual display, of interest for the Middle Ages where art history and history of ideas make common cause.

Verbal expression operates in the same modality in different media. Language exerting force and conferring charisma is a large area which remains largely uninvestigated.33 Speech and writing perform as charismatic forces and have the greatest merit when engaged in a field of competition, wielded as an instrument of the individual to assert and defend itself.34 To write and read poems and literature means little; to do things via writing (the word as deed) counts for a lot. To live a poetic life and shape a novel-like narrative of self is a distinction, not to sit at a desk and create one with ink on parchment. Speech has its own charismatic modality when it operates either in a rhetorical mode that overwhelms and persuades or in the mode of action; language as combat and competition for dominance has a high cachet.35 Here is William Fitzstephen’s description of the education in rhetoric of young men in the city schools of London in the second half of the twelfth century; it is from Fitzstephen’s biography of Becket (1174), the unconventional introductory passage that describes at length the city of London and its culture. Rhetoric is taught as a form of combat. Students compete and debate in every area of learning—specifically, in rhetoric:

Some call on the ‘ancient art of eloquence according to the trivium’, composing epigrams and poems either rhythmic or metrical. Others put their efforts into mockery and ridicule: ‘With biting Socratic wit they touch on the vices and weaknesses of their comrades, perhaps even the vices of great men’.36

The witty and ironic response, the barbed quip, the quick-witted put down—these weapons of speech had high value in school learning, but also in public life. Rhetoric and verbal skill are not just means of description and expression, but ammunition in the combat and competition of social and political life. The phrase “verbal dueling” expresses the militant aspect of this rhetoric of attack and conquer.

The court of Henry II of England and the circle of intellectuals surrounding Thomas Becket, was one large and important cultural sphere where sharp, dangerous speech was a useful tool of domination, of overcoming an adversary.

(See esp. Beyer, Witz und Ironie, n. 30 above)

Speech striving for domination in verbal contention can shed charisma on the one who masters it and dominates others. So does poetry composed for performance. Many sources attest to the charismatic qualities of poetry prior to the twelfth century.37 More than is appreciated at present, poetry is a major element in medieval education up to the thirteenth century. Reading and memorizing are important, but composition of poetry is the higher goal. A high level of linguistic virtuosity striven for in school composition is a valuable commodity, widely cultivated in cathedral and monastic schools. It comes to fruition in public life. The highest level of composition is spontaneous—the gift of speaking poetry.

Poetry of a certain kind has near-magical powers to influence reality; the composed work aims at functioning as action, not fiction. Beliefs in the magical efficacy of poetry cluster around the learned poet into the twelfth century. In charismatic poetry, the written or spoken word asserts itself as action. The word strives toward the condition of a deed. The poet Godfrey of Rheims (d. 1094), schoolmaster and chancellor of Rheims cathedral, thanks his friend and fellow poet Bishop Hugh of Langres (d. 1085), because once during a serious illness which no medicine could cure, one of Hugh’s songs had cured him.38 Godfrey wrote of poetry in general, “A powerful thing is genius and stronger than the sharp sword. The eloquent tongue cuts through the armed duke”.39 Poetry also has the power to exalt and to do damage:

• In song if you wish to raise the powerful into the heavens,
• In song you can raise whomever you like to the heavens.
• In song if you wish to do damage to your enemies,
• Then your enemy will be damaged in song.40

The above-mentioned Bishop Hugh of Langres featured in an incident in which poetry, seemingly spontaneously composed, served as a weapon in a political dispute in his church. The poet-bishop was angered when the Bishop of Laon refused to confirm a boy whom Hugh had appointed church exorcist. Hugh “removed the injury with his biting wit, and hurled this riposte into the face of the archbishop”. Then the chronicler quotes Hugh’s poem of 12 hexameters in rhyming couplets, putting the archbishop in his place.41 The narrative presents the exchange as if the answer were composed on the spot in the heat of an angry confrontation. This is poetry as a weapon in church politics.42

Baudri of Bourgueil was a great admirer of Godfrey. He praised him as “the greatest of all poets”. The spirit of Virgil and Ovid lives in him. Surrounded by influential people seeking his favor, he can raise up and bring down whom he wishes. Baudri seeks his patronage and asks expressly for the fame that he can give through his poetry:

• If you should wish it, I shall be set among the stars.
• If I am to be translated, I shall be translated, if you wish it…
• Because my fame will not let me die to future generations…
• And he will survive whom your muse sings.43

The use of poetic composition in judicial argumentation, a weapon of another kind, is an understudied feature of early medieval intellectual life. It is a well-known characteristic of legal argumentation in other charismatic societies (Arabic, Indian, Chinese). There is good reason to think that law cases in the high cultures of the East and Near East were particularly compelling when argued in poetic form and sung. There are traces of legal speeches in poetic form in the Latin culture of the West. Jacob Grimm argued that poetic composition had been in use in pre-Christian German legal practice.44 In the Nordic cultural sphere, the poet-prophet-warrior Egil Skalagrimson rescued himself from a sentence of death before the court of the king of Norway by composing, overnight, his so-called head song. Throughout the saga Egil is depicted as composing poems on the spur of the moment.45 In continental Europe in general, however, through antiquity and the Middle Ages, law speaks not in a poetic but a rhetorical style. What rhetorical theory knows as the grand style is the bearer of charismatic effects, aiming to take possession of the mind of the listener and sweeping the judge along like a raging stream (Quintilian).

Charismatic poetry magnifies the poet and their patron, teacher or lord. A witty epigram of praise spoken before the king could bring rich rewards for the poet and heightened glory for the king. Court poetry in Latin and Old Norse is notoriously obscure.46 The purpose of the hermeneutic or obscure style of court poetry is to lend charisma equally to the poet and the ruler. Court poetry is meant to ennoble and to exalt. In the early Middle Ages until the twelfth century, poetry was written for performance, not for publication. That is why so little of it has survived. Its purpose exhausted itself in the glorification of its recipient and in a display of the poet’s virtuosity. Poetry is there to lend charisma, not to invite reading or even to invite performance by others than the author. A poem in charismatic culture is for one-time use—more if it becomes famous. It sheds honor on the recipient and confers the aura of virtuosity on its performer, then is not seen or heard again, unless sung again.

The grand style and the prophetic sermon (sermo propheticus) are phenomena of the earlier Middle Ages. They aim at grand effects: to captivate and enthrall the reader or listener. It is high praise when a preacher can transport the mind of the listener out of itself: when Aelred of Rievaulx preached, so said Gilbert of Hoyland, “it regularly happened that he subtly snatched away the mind of the listener into an ecstatic rapture of minds alienated and inebriated. You could feel the vehemence of intoxicating grace in his words. His thought was straightforward but his emotions vehement”.47 Roger Bacon, railing against the aridity of scholastic argumentation, called for poetic rhetorical language which can lead the listener to ecstatic ascent: “Arguments must be sublime and decorous… so that the soul is snatched away suddenly and forcefully to the love of the object of persuasion”. Eloquence induces what we normally think of as mystical states.

In these and other ways, composed language was seen as having properties close to magic.

Rhetoric must be seen in this light, as well as in its more decorative, aesthetic aspect. At its most primal it wins over the mind and soul of the listener by speech, takes control of another person’s dispositions and convictions, and reshapes them. A comment by Paul Ricoeur puts us in mind of this aspect of persuasive speech: “Before it became futile, rhetoric was dangerous”.48 The power to persuade is the power to manipulate. In “dangerous” rhetoric, a passive charismatic emanation, as of the working of body magic, is transformed into an active force, projects a fascinating voice and imposes itself on another human being, capturing, asserting control.

Other aspects of life in learned culture prior to the twelfth century could with equal force show the charismatic quality shared in many aspects of the culture: education,49 love and friendship, music, and of course the heroics of combat, athletic competition, vying for political favor, and advocacy (the main purpose of rhetoric for a curialis—cf. the letters of John of Salisbury.)

Debates and disputations were “agonal” much more than intellectual prior to the twelfth century, aimed more at determining the better debater than at analyzing some intellectual or theological problem.50 Analysis of ideas became an issue in the twelfth century and beyond (intellectualized/textualized culture).

8. Transformations

“Individuals seem to gain or lose charismatic power over their life course”.51 So do societies. The charismatic elements of medieval culture, as they developed into the twelfth century, underwent a series of sea changes from the twelfth to the thirteenth century. I am far from claiming a single explanation for these transitions. But casting a general look at the areas and the character of change underscores the loss of charismatic forms of thought and expression.

The period is in many ways the watershed between the ancient and the modern world. Its transitional nature has been the focus of much critical attention. Charles Radding has used Piaget’s model of the growth of consciousness to understand a whole variety of trends towards rationalizing, for instance the abolition of the ordeal, in the twelfth century.52 A profound discussion of the transition in media has made use of the categories of oral culture and literate culture.53 In education, the formation of the student in manners and speech was superseded by intellectual rationalism. A humanistic formation was replaced by scholastic learning and teaching, logical devising and judging of arguments. The teacher changed from a charismatic model for students to a learned conveyor of knowledge. The divinely inspired teacher, who shaped their students in their own image and likeness, faded out of the picture.54 By contrast, in intellectual life, the erosion of hierarchy, the transformation of the teacher, a figure never far from a prophet/priest in charismatic culture, drained the charismatic charge of the person of the teacher and made it available to anyone who could successfully assert intellectual dominance, such as Peter Abelard. Teachers were of much lower standing in the thirteenth century than in the preceding centuries, where the schoolmaster was a step or two from bishop. Poor Anselm of Laon, in his teaching and his actions as chancellor at Laon a man of great distinction, was vulnerable to the charge of intellectual mediocrity leveled at him by Abelard, memorably described in the Historia calamatitum as foggy of mind, distinguished only by his eloquence and personal presence.55 In the mid-thirteenth century, the question was seriously debated as to whether it was possible for a teacher to teach anything. The radical position said, no: only God teaches. Thomas Aquinas took a moderated position in a disputed question De magistro: students learn by inborn capacities. The teacher has only a mediating role. The teacher is to a student’s knowledge and understanding as the doctor is to the patient’s health.56 Gone is the image of the teacher as a transformative model shaping students by the magical–mystical force of his personal presence.

Many areas of intellectual culture, theology, and philosophy experienced a reorientation from “real presence” to symbolic. This is most evident in the area from which I have borrowed the terms: the Eucharist controversy.57 The belief in the real presence of Christ’s body and blood in the sacrament has to defend itself in opposition to a rising claim that Christ’s presence was purely symbolic.

The philosophical discussion of Universals shows a like reorientation from the reality of universal concepts to their quality as mere names. The shift is most prominent in the historical record in the dispute between William of Champeaux and Peter Abelard. Nominalism abolishes universal archetypes or places them in a realm inaccessible to human reason, and it changes language from God-given, thing-like signifiers into a man-made symbolic code.58

We see a related transformation in secular and ecclesiastical governance, especially the change from itinerant kingship (real presence of the king) to administrative kingship (the king “represented” through documents, contracts, bailiffs, and magistrates and “symbolized”, represented as visually present, in seals).59 Procedures for electing bishops and abbots change from a system based on charismatic selection (virtue, personal authority, miracle) to one based on bureaucratic selection (canonical procedure formulated in texts and documents).60 Bernard of Clairvaux objected strongly to canonical procedure because it trivialized the process; legal procedure undermined personal authority.61 It is a conservative voice protesting the disappearance of subjective judgment (the right candidate divinely revealed), because objective, reasoned judgment according to rules, abolished the element of inspiration.

In written genres, the shift is also evident in the fading from the scene of the dominant genres of the eleventh century, the biography and the personal letter, both of which presuppose real presence, and the emergence of a welter of new fictional forms which do not. By the second half of the twelfth century, a new form of narrative was popular among the aristocracy—the courtly romance. In charming and flowing narratives, knights were shaped, educated, formed into models of chivalrous conduct, and tested at the hands of charismatic damsels, whose mere presence infuses virtue.62 The new narrative creates a new fashion of imitating romances among the nobles, expressed in pageantry and ceremony, in fashions of clothing and naming. At the same time, a new mode of representing the human body in sculpture was on the rise. It created supple, clinging garments, giving to the curve and posture of the body a grace and elegance not seen in representation since classical antiquity and to the facial expression a life-like realism and a supernatural serenity and beauty. This is a trend we can call the “textualizing” or “enfabulation of charisma”. The heroism (in the sense earlier defined) of the passing age entered a textual contract with the scribes, clerics, storytellers, sculptors, and stonemasons of the scholastic age. Charisma of the body, which had previously defined itself as sculpture-like and imagined gods and angels envying it, now was re-incorporated in courtly literature and Gothic sculpture.

What these various historical changes register is an oceanic shift from a charismatic to an intellectual culture. Culture moves away from magical to rational modes of thinking, speaking, and representing.

9. Nostalgia for the Past

This remolding of culture into rational, prosaic, sober, unpoetic, unmagical, and uncharismatic forms was observed by those who lived through the changes. We find texts regretting them but none or few welcoming them. I close by presenting three texts that summarize this negative judgment of the transformations of culture in the twelfth century. This is not to indict or denigrate the thirteenth century, but to confirm from contemporary witnesses that the changes were perceived as the emptying of charisma from the forms of action and expression of an earlier age. The nostalgia was that of prominent, prolific figures living through the changes, not of a modern viewer.

The comments sweep the major areas of intellectual, religious, and creative enterprise.

The first is from a German cleric and schoolmaster of Bamberg Cathedral, Hugo of Trimberg. In a didactic poem called “The Runner” (Der Renner, ca. 1300) he expressed a malaise with the world of the present and a longing for earlier days. He noted the disappearance of great men, especially painful among those available for the papacy and for service to the church. The need for human greatness in a bishop and staff no longer existed. The administration of the church was carried out by administrative machinery set in place and operated by the papacy, and the person of the bishop made very little difference, as long as he was loyal to the papacy. Hugo of Trimberg has a very specific explanation for this change; the age has declined from the glories of the past: “There are no more holy bishops. Good and honored princes were once able to choose honest and outstanding men”. The choice of bishops is now given into the hands of the clergy. No longer does court service produce men of high worth, he says, men such as Otto of Bamberg, Anno of Cologne, Godehard of Hildesheim, and Thomas Becket. The writer clearly had a concept of the great man, the great bishop, and the great pope. And the route to that rank and standing, says this schoolmaster of an old imperial church, had been court service. These men, he says, rose to high dignity at court by their courtliness (zuht) and honorable actions. He pins the vanishing of a great age precisely on the disappearance of the system of choosing bishops which was dismantled by the investiture controversy. Now it is no longer kings and princes, “in their purity”, who choose by special insight (bekennen). Who can hope for “holy bishops” when monks and clerics are electing them? Since canonical choice rules, bishops are no longer “holy” in this writer’s view.63

Also lost with that change in church and empire was a broad system of humanistic education that had arisen at German cathedral schools in alliance with the emperor, spread through Germany and France64, which all those mentioned by Hugo of Trimberg had studied and made their career in (with the exception of the ascetic Godehard of Hildesheim). That system of education lost its value as preparation for state service. In the new phase of culture, students seek lucrative professions at the universities, in the courts of law and the medical profession, and in the schools of the new monastic orders, philosophy and theology. The figure of the mighty imperial bishop (Hugo von Trimberg: “clerical princes”, pfaffenfürsten) disappeared from the scene, and with it went the education system that formed such men.

Second text: A Middle High German poet of the mid-thirteenth century, Rudolf von Ems, a prolific narrative poet, laments in a long literary survey that a period of greatness has passed in German poetry. The contemporary (mid to late thirteenth century) poets are a mere shadow of their distinguished predecessors. Now, poets are workmen who paste together words and rhymes, but the substance and high ethical vision of earlier poets elude them. The spirit of art has vanished from poetry. Konrad von Würzburg, a near contemporary, also complains about the proliferation of poetry and the corresponding decline of its quality. The complaint was so widespread as to constitute a shared conviction of this post-classical age.65 It seemed to contemporaries that the heart and soul had gone out of narrative, and the endlessly long and tedious epics produced by Rudolf and Konrad (to name only the most skilled of these epigones) bore out their judgment. Modern readers tend to agree.

Third text: Roger Bacon, English Franciscan, philosopher, and polymath, wrote a series of tracts in the second half of the 1260s, on the decline of learning in his own time. His Opus majus and other tracts responded to a request by Pope Clement VI in 1266 for a proposal to reform the universities and the church. What a chance for a single thinker to sweep the entire spiritual, intellectual, and musical scene of the contemporary world! His answer to the pope, in brief, was that the culture of learning and religion was in steep decline. He delivered a scathing criticism of the thought, theology, devotional practice, and virtually every aspect of intellectual activity of the church and the universities of his time. On church music, he wrote that everything that had been done in the past thirty years was a mockery of the divine office, contrary to the art and contrary to the truth [of music].66 On preaching, he wrote that the present generation had utterly destroyed the art of preaching. Those who practiced it traded in eccentricities and nonsense of the most extreme order. Scholasticism had saturated and dried out an art that required passion and spontaneity. Bacon called for a return to modes of expression that had persisted since ancient times, but had died out in his own youth—a poetic mode of argumentation: rhetorical persuasion, not logical demonstration; poetic language, not scholastic sobriety; the Bible in the full passion, majesty and truth of its original languages, not the Book of Sentences of Peter Lombard.

These three texts agree that a period of greatness has passed; gone are great men, great literature, and great religious culture. A duller, more insipid, less inspired culture has supplanted the preeminence of the past. These witnesses have experienced the fading of a charismatic culture and the advent of a textual/intellectual culture.67 The loss of charismatic modes of thought and action was due at least in part to the separation of the institutions of government from that system of humanistic education. An ideal of formation that shaped students into “vessels of glory” faded with the transfer of education to larger institutions, universities, and the transformation of curriculum to a textual, intellectual culture based on knowledge content, logical argumentation, and systematizing modes

But while its institutional support, the imperial church, collapsed, the old curriculum in “letters and manners” found new homes. It was folded into the court cultures of France, England and Spain. Court education was aristocratic and elitist. It took many of the forms of the old education: letters and manners, literary and poetic expression, that intellectual side joined of course to athletic and military training. Chivalric culture made the formation of character according to classical models (mores, manners) into a virtually obligatory course of formation for noblemen. The education was joined with a curriculum in letters, long ignored as a component of the education of knights, but now illumined by Martin Aurell’s study, Le chevalier lettré.68 In kingship, the symbolism, rites, rituals and fashions of power, and the superstructure of charisma flourished, probably increasing in extravagant show to the same degree as its rulers shrank in personal charisma.69

In each of these countries, the centers of worldly power continued to function, enspirited by a belief in what Clifford Geertz calls “an inherent sacredness of sovereign power”. What I referred to earlier as the charge and force of charismatic individuals and the exaltation of actions by heroic ambitions, these charismatic paraphenomena, presupposed a transcendent giving force channeled through and embodied in the king or emperor. Just as the will of the prince had or could have the force of law, it also had the force of charisma. Customs, manners, and fashions, filtered down from the prince, were caught up and absorbed like an emanation of light or electrical power, or by the working of some “Demonic” gravitational pull, in the society of the nobility, and by those at lower levels of the hierarchy.