Following the liturgical calendar, the second installment in the festal homilies of Ivo of Chartres pertains to the celebration of the Nativity of Christ (De nativitate). For a short discussion of the context of this work, please see my previous post about his homily on Advent (De adventu Domini).
Emmanuel Tzanes, Christ Healing the Blind (1686). Public domain.
Stylistically, there are many similarities between Ivo’s homilies on Advent and on the Nativity. Perhaps most notable is the ongoing use of parallel structure. While a bit less noticeable than in the homily on Advent, Ivo regularly contrasts human and godly nature, the Mosaic and Christian laws, Eve and Mary, etc. Throughout, the focus in the text is the economy of salvation, that is, how the life of Christ has made possible the rewards of heaven and eternal life for his listeners.
Some passages in this homily merit further reflection. The first half of the text is dominated by a meditation on Christ as the Great Physician, based on the miracle of the healing of the man born blind in the Gospel of St. John (9:6) and further echoing, although never directly citing, a passage in the Gospel of Luke (5:31, “They that are whole, need not the physician: but they that are sick”). For Ivo, in a spiritual sense, Christ applies both homeopathic and heteropathic remedies. In order to confer health “through similar things” (“sanitatem contulit aegrotis per similia”), Christ endured and overcame the physical aspects of human life – birth, suffering, and death – in order that humanity might enjoy the spiritual counterparts of each – rebirth (in baptism), the avoidance of eternal torture, freedom from eternal death. Conversely, Christ the Physician also effected a cure through opposite means (“quibus contrariis contrarios morbos evacuaverit”): he granted freedom as a servant; he overcame pride through humility; he corrected our disobedience though his own obedience.
The second half of the text settles into a style of typological commentary very typical of Ivo’s other homilies, especially his liturgical commentaries, in which he contrasts the historical accounts in Genesis and the requirements of the Mosaic Law with their Christian and New Testament parallels. The sacrificial lamb of the original Passover is a forerunner of the true Lamb. Instead of doors being marked with the blood of the sacrifice, the foreheads of the faithful are marked with the sign of Christ’s sacrifice, i.e., the Cross. In place of the Old Testament priesthood, Christ himself is the priest who offers himself, since no other priest would be worthy to make such a sacrifice. In a similar way, Eve is contrasted with Mary: the curse of Eve, to bear children in pain, is revoked in the person of Christ’s mother, who received instead a blessing (“Benedicta tu in mulieribus”).
Ivo concludes with an emphasis on the incomplete knowledge of the divine afforded to us who are still making our pilgrimage, as it were, on earth, and exhorts us to be mindful of the salvific works of Christ as a means of easing the burden of the present life.
Born around 1040, Ivo of Chartres is primarily known to modern scholarship as a canonist, and he is occasionally recognized as a prolific writer of letters, but relatively little regard has been given to his surviving collection of homilies [1]. This scholarly neglect has been most keenly demonstrated by the absence of critical editions of the sermons, despite the call of Roger Reynolds over thirty years ago, with the overall effect of reducing the quality of academic discourse on one of the more prominent liturgists of the period of the Investiture Controversy [2].
Cambridge, Corpus Christi, Parker Library 289. Ivo of Chartres, Sermo de sacramentis neophitorum, here ascribed to Hugh of St. Victor. Images courtesy of The Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
The text most commonly cited in scholarly literature, and the one used in my translation of this homily, is that published by Jacques Paul Migne in Patrologia Latina vol. 162, which is in turn based on previous editions by Fronteau and Hittorp. Although I was not able to consult them within the scope of this project, more than seventy manuscripts survive that contain some or all of the homilies included in the Migne edition. The most important would be Chartres, Bibliothèque Municipal 138, which formerly belonged to Chartres Cathedral, but it was heavily damaged in the Allied bombing of the city during the Second World War and is now largely unreadable. The remaining manuscripts are distributed broadly across Western Europe, with large concentrations in the British Museum, various colleges in Oxford and Cambridge, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and the Vatican. A surprising number of the extant witnesses date to the twelfth century, suggesting that this collection became popular shortly after its creation. The collection as a whole, to the best of my knowledge, has never been translated into a modern language. This specific sermon, however, was partially translated in the late 1940s as part of a broader gathering of works from across the Patristic and Medieval homiletic tradition [3].
The homilies in Ivo’s collection fall broadly into two categories. The first, encompassing numbers 1–6 and 22–24, are essentially liturgical commentaries, offering detailed allegorical explorations of various rites (e.g., Sermo I, De sacramentis neophytorum), other incidental features (e.g., Sermo III, De significationibus indumentorum sacerdotium), or specific prayers (e.g., Sermo XXII, De Oratione Dominica) of the Church. The balance of the homilies are on the feasts of the church, beginning with Advent and working through the feasts of the Nativity, Circumcision, Epiphany, Purification (Candlemas), and the Lenten and Paschal cycles. The audience for some or all of these homilies appears to have been an assembly of the local clergy of Chartres: many of the manuscripts add the phrase “in synodo habitus” (something like “considered in synod”) to the titles of some of the texts, and even in the text below Ivo addresses his audience as “Your Fraternity,” strongly suggesting, at least to me, that he was speaking to other clerics [4].
The text presented below is the first of the festal homilies and discusses Advent, or, as Ivo insists, both Advents of Christ. The entirety of the work maintains a parallel structure, contrasting the first Advent, i.e., the earthly ministry of Christ, with the second, during which Christ will return as judge. Throughout, an emphasis is placed on the redemptive and restorative work that has already been accomplished during the “hidden” Advent, which prepares his audience for the completion of salvation in the second, “manifest,” coming.
Nick Kamas PhD in Medieval Studies University of Notre Dame
The most comprehensive study of Ivo of Chartres is by Rolf Sprandel, Ivo von Chartres und seine Stellung in der Kirchengeschichte (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1962). His life is also occasionally discussed in other secondary literature, especially on Ivo as a canonist, e.g., Christof Rolker, Canon Law and the Letters of Ivo of Chartres (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Roger Reynolds, “Liturgical Scholarship at the Time of the Investiture Controversy: Past Research and Future Opportunities,” The Harvard Theological Review, 71 (1978): 109–124).
Ray C. Petry, ed., No Uncertain Sound, Sermons that Shaped the Pulpit Tradition, (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1948), 140–142.
Credit belongs to Margot Fassler for suggesting the setting for these homilies, The Virgin of Chartres (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 136.
MS B44 Inferiore of Milan’s Ambrosiana Library is an unstudied aestivial (summer season) homiliary from the thirteenth century. It is an exceptionally large manuscript, measuring approximately 40cm by 30cm. An eighteenth-century librarian of the Ambrosiana marked it as a homiliary of the “Ambrosian rite,” which is not a description meaningful for ascertaining the paradigms on which the homiliary’s structure is based. The invocation of the “Ambrosian rite” does, however, point to peculiarities in the Lombard region’s liturgical calendar which B44 might reflect. The homiliary’s reflection of local liturgical traditions could best be judged through a study of its “sanctorum” portion; this, however, was not the focus of my time with the manuscript. Despite its large size and length, the homiliary only spans the summer part of the liturgical year. Its de tempore section begins with the Easter Vigil and ends with the Feast of the Nativity of the Virgin. The Feast of Mary’s Nativity was locally important since the Milanese Duomo was dedicated, from at least the eleventh century, to the Blessed Virgin’s birth.
To familiarize myself with the manuscript’s structure and homiletic content, I surveyed the sermons it included for the Easter season (1v-52r), noting sermon incipits from Easter until Pentecost. Though for the sanctorale section, there are a wide variety of authors, the Easter de tempore section largely consists of homilies from Sts. Ambrose, Bede, Gregory, and Augustine. The sermon choices are, however, eclectic, and do not match the arrangement of the paradigmatic homiliaries summarized by Réginald Grégoire in his still-unsurpassed Homéliaires Liturgiques Médiévaux. In short, MS Inf. B44’s Easter sermons do not match those included in the Roman and Toledan homiliaries, nor those in the collections of Pseudo-Fulgencius, Paul the Deacon, or Romain d’Agimond. As far as contemporary homiletic developments go, Inf. B44 also is far removed from the pocket-manuscript homiliaries popular among the mobile mendicants; more generally, the patristic collection of Easter homilies here does not reflect high medieval developments in preaching. No “scholastic” sermons based around themae are included, nor is there any trace of the politically and socially-charged “activist” preaching of mendicants like Giordano da Pisa (1255-1311) or Remigio de Girolami (d. 1319). In short, though Inf. B44 compiles an eclectic set of sermons, it is a conservative exemplar of the homiliary genre.
The description of the eighteenth-century Ambrosiana librarian on the manuscript’s first folio also notes that B44 Inf. was acquired for the Ambrosiana in the seventeenth century, when it was removed from Milan’s cathedral. It is unknown if the homiliary had been a possession of the cathedral from the outset, and, if not, why or when it was moved to the cathedral. Judging by the highly moralizing and interior-focused content of the Easter sermons, it is possible that the homiliary had been used by the cathedral canons or a northern Italian monastic community. From its large size, it seems the homiliary likely would have stayed in one place, for use in private mediation or as an aid for the composition of monastic sermons. If we seek a more specific paradigm, it should be noted that B44 Inf. shares basic similarities with high-medieval Cistercian homiliaries copied in northern Italian and Burgundian monasteries, such as the house of Morimondo near Milan. These Cistercian homiliaries were usually fairly large, written in twelfth-century miniscule, and included sermons of Augustine, Bede, Ambrose, and Gregory—all characteristics that B44 Inf. shares.[1] However, further study of the Cistercian homiliaries of northern Italy is necessary to ascertain whether these and our manuscript conform to a common paradigm.
Saint Maximus of Turin, Anonymous (Italian, Piedmontese), Carte Sciolte, n. 390, Archivio Storico della Città, Turin, from Codice degli Statuti di Torino o “Codice della Catena,” 1360.
Particularly interesting among Inf. B44’s Easter sermons is the second entry for the fifth day after Easter, located between ff. 16v and 17v. This homily, misattributed in the manuscript to St. Ambrose (probably as a result of local enthusiasm for that venerable bishop), is actually a probable composition of St. Maximus of Turin, and its main theme—defending oneself from lustful temptations—coheres well with the manuscript’s probable monastic origin. However, how the sermon conveys this theme is in no way typical, as it does so by extended engagement with the story of Ulysses and the Sirens. Though in Late Antiquity, scientific exegesis of Greek mythology was very common in neo-Platonic circles, Christocentric engagement with a mythological text is a rare phenomenon, even within Maximus’ own homiletic corpus.
To provide a brief analysis of the sermon: Maximus begins by recalling the passage of Ulysses’ ship past the isle of the Sirens, whose lusty song is irresistible to the sailors. Because Ulysses knows that the ship will be lost if it is captured by the siren song, he ties himself to the mast. For Maximus, the mast and the ship to which the sailors cling are figures of the cross of Christ, on which all sin is expiated. Maximus soon moves from the example of Ulysses—whose story he calls “fictive and not factual”—to Moses’ healing of his people by means of a snake affixed to a staff. Unlike the Ulysses example, the history of the Jewish people is factual, and so truly prefigures Christ’s sacrifice. It can be argued that Maximus’ Christocentric interpretation of Ulysses’ binding to the mast is inspired by Christian exegesis of the Hebrew Scriptures, the methods of which Maximus then applies to Greek myth. There is, after all, a strong exegetical tradition, beginning already with the second century Christian apologist Justin Martyr, which sees ships—specifically Noah’s ark—as a figure of the cross. From there, the paradigm might be easily transferred even to the ships of Greek myth. But transference is not all that Maximus is doing, notwithstanding his curt dismissal of Ulysses’ story. For later in the sermon Maximus encapsulates salvation-history thus: “Fittingly is he crucified on wood so that, since man was deceived in paradise by the tree of desire, he might now be saved by the same tree of wood; and the matter which was the cause of death might be the remedy of health.” In Maximus’ thought, nature itself—here instantiated in wood—constitutes the means of salvation, providing remedies for the bodily weakness of humankind. Since Ulysses’ salvation came directly through divinely-created nature, his tale is not just some forgettable fable. In this conception, however subtly stated, pagans and non-Christians are not outside the economy of salvation, for they, too, exist within a grace-filled nature which can proffer the remedies for their ailments.
For my transcription, translation and recitations (in Modern English and Latin), see my multimedia edition of Maximus of Turin’s homily for the fifth day after Easter in Ambrosiana MS B44 Inferiore.
Mihow McKenny PhD Candidate in History University of Notre Dame
[1] Mirella Ferrari, “Dopo Bernardo: biblioteche e ‘scriptoria’ cisterciensi dell’Italia settentrionale nel XII secolo,” in Pietro Zerbi, ed., San Bernardo e l’Italia. Milan, 1993, pp. 253-306.
Bibliography
D’Avray, D. L. The Preaching of the Friars: Sermons Diffused from Paris before 1300. Oxford: Clarendon, 1985.
De Lubac, Henri. Medieval Exegesis: The Four Senses of Scripture. 3 volumes. Translated by Mark Sebanc and E. M. Macierowski. Eerdmans, 1998-2009.
Ferrari, Mirella. “Dopo Bernardo: biblioteche e ‘scriptoria’ cisterciensi dell’Italia settentrionale nel XII secolo.” In Pietro Zerbi, ed., San Bernardo e l’Italia. Milan, 1993, pp. 253-306.
Grégoire, Réginald. Homéliaires liturgiques médiévaux : analyse de manuscrits. Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 1980.
Longère, Jean. La Prédication Médiévale. Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1983.
Maximus of Turin. Maximi episcopi taurinensis sermones.Edited by A. Mutzenbecher. Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, vol. 23. Turnhout: Brepols, 1962.
Rahner, Hugo, S.J. Greek Myths and Christian Mystery. Translated by Brian Battershaw. New York: Harper and Row, 1963.
