PASSION
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PASSION
same strain is continued over several pages, and
amongst otlicr quaint fancies St. Ephraem remarks:
"The very column must have quivered as if it were
alive, the cold stone must have felt that the Master
was bound to it who had given it its being. The col-
umn shuddered knowing that the Lord of all creatures
was being scourged". .And he adds, as a marvel,
witnessed even in his own day, that the "column had
contracted with fear beneath the Body of Christ".
In the devotional atmosphere represented by such contemplations as these, it is easy to comprehend the scenes of touching emotion depicted by the pilgrim lady of Galicia who visited Jerusalem (if Dr. Mees- ter's protest may be safely neglected) towards the end of the fourth century. At Gethsemane she describes how "that passage of the Gospel is read where the Lord was apprehended, and when this passage has been read there is such a moaning and groaning of all the people, with weeping, that the groans can be heard almost at the city". While during the three hours' ceremony on Good Friday from midday onwards we are told: "At the several lections and prayers there is such emotion displayed and lamentation of all the people as is wonderful to hear. For there is no one, great or small, who does not weep on that day during those three hours, in a way that cannot be imagined, that the Lord should have suffered such things for us" (Peregrinatio Sylviae in "Itinera Hier- osolymitana", ed. Geyer, 87, S9). It is difficult not to suppose that this example of the manner of honouring Our Saviour's Passion, which was traditional in the very scenes of those sufferings, did not produce a notable impression upon Western Europe. The lady from Galicia, whether we call her Syhda, ^theria, or Egeria, was but one of the vast crowd of pilgrims who streamed to Jerusalem from all parts of the world. The tone of St. Jerome (see for instance the letters of Paula and Eustochium to Marcella in A. D. 38(5; P. L., XXII, 491) is similar, and St. Jerome's words pene- trated wherever the Latin language was spoken. An early Christian prayer, reproduced by Wessely (Les plus anciens mon. de Chris., 206), shows the same spirit.
We can hardly doubt that soon after the relics of the True Cross had been carried by devout worshippers into all Christian lands (we know the fact not only from the statement of St. Cyril of Jerusalem himself but also from inscriptions found in North Africa only a little later in date) that some ceremonial analogous to our modern "adoration" of the Cross upon Good Friday was introduced, in imitation of the similar veneration paid to the relic of the True Cross at Jerusalem. It was at this time too that the figure of the Crucified began to be depicted in Christian art, though for many centuries any attempt at a realistic presentment of the sufferings of Christ was almost unknown. Even in Gregory of Tours (De Gloria Mart.) a picture of Christ upon the cross seems to be treated as something of a novelty. Still such hymns as the "Pange lingua gloriosi prailium certaminis", and the "Vexilla regis", both by Venantius Fortunatus (c. 570), clearly mark a growing tendency to dwell upon the Passion as a sepa- rate object of contemplation. The more or less dra- matic recital of the Passion by three deacons represent- ing the "Chronista", "Christus", and "Synagoga", in the Office of Holy Week probably originated at the same period, and not many centuries later we begin to find the narratives of the Passion in the Four Evangel- ists copied separately into books of devotion. This, for example, is the case in the ninth-century English collection known as "the Book of Cerne". An eighth- century collection of devotions (MS. Harley 2965) contains pages connecterl with the incidents of the Passion. In the tenth century the Cursus of the Holy Cross was added to the monastic Office (see Bishop, "Origin of the Prymer", p. x.xvii, n.).
Still more striking in its revelation of the develop- ments of devotional imagination is the existence of XL— 34
such a vernacular poem as Cynewulf's "Dream of the
Hood ", in which the tree of the cross is conceived of as
telling its own story. A portion of this Anglo-Saxon
poem still stands engraved in runic letters upon the
celebrated Ruthwell Cross in Dumfriesshire, Scotland.
The italicized lines in the following represent portions
of the poem which can still be read upon the stone:
I had power all
his foes to fell,
but yet I stood fast.
The7i the young hero prepared himself,
That was Almighty God,
Strong and firm of mood,
he mounted the lofty cross
courageously in the sight of many,
when he willed to redeem mankind.
I trembled when the hero embraced me,
yet dared I not bow down to earth,
fall to the bosom of the ground,
but I was compelled to stand fast,
a cross was I reared,
/ raised the powerful King
The lord of the heavens,
I dared not fall down.
They pierced me w^th dark nails,
on me are the wounds visible. Still it was not until the time of St. Bernard and St. Francis of Assisi that the full developments of Chris- tian devotion to the Passion were reached. It seems highly probable that this was an indirect result of the preaching of the Crusades, and the consequent awaken- ing of the minds of the faithful to a deeper realization of all the sacred memories represented by Calvary and the Holy Sepulchre. When Jerusalem was recaptured by the Saracens in 1 187, worthy Abbot Samson of Bury St. Edmunds was so deeply moved that he put on hair- cloth and renounced flesh meat from that day forth — and this was not a solitary case, as the enthusiasm evoked by the Crusades conclusively shows.
Under any circumstances it is noteworthy that the first recorded instance of stigmata (if we leave out of account the doubtful case of St. Paul) was that of St. Francis of Assisi. Since his time there have been over 320 similar manifestations which have reasonable claims to be considered genuine (Poulain, "Graces of Interior Prayer", tr., 175). Whether we regard these as being wholly supernatural or partly natural in their origin, the comparative frequency of the phenomenon seems to point to a new attitude of Catholic mysticism in regard to the Passion of Christ, which has only established itself since the beginning of the thirteenth century. The testimony of art points to a similar conclusion. It was only at about this same period that realistic and sometimes extravagantly contorted crucifixes met with any general favour. The people, of course, lagged far behind the mystics and the reli- gious orders, but they followed in their wake; and in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries we have innu- merable illustrations of the adoption by the laity of new practices of piety to honour Our Lord's Passion. One of the most fruitful and practical was that type of spiritual pilgrimage to the Holy Places of Jerusalem, which eventually crystallized into what is now known to us as the "Way of the Cross" (q. v.). The "Seven Falls" and the "Seven Bloodsheddings" of Christ may be regarded as variants of this form of devotion. How truly genuine was the piety evoked in an actual pilgrimage to the Holy Land is made very clear, among other documents, by the narrative of the journeys of the Dominican Felix Fabri at the close of the fifteenth century, and the immense labour taken to obtain exact measurements shows how deeply men's hearts were stirred by even a counterfeit pil- grimage. Equally to this period belong both the popularity of the Little Offices of the Cross and "De Passione", which are found in so many of the Horae, manuscript and printed, and also the introduction of
