Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/224

198 descriptions and terrifying images. Dante has touched with beauty the darkness of hell: Farinata and Ugolino are heroic, and Lucifer is majestic. But this monk, devoid of all poetic grace, draws a picture of devouring torment and nothing more; his very dullness makes the horror of it. "Let us imagine," he says, "a white-hot oven, and in this oven a naked man, never to be released from such a torment. Does not the mere sight of it appear insupportable? How miserable this man would seem to us! Let us think how he would sprawl in the oven, how he would yell and roar: in short, how he would live, and what would be his agony and his sorrow when he understood that this unbearable punishment was never to end."

The horrible cold, the loathsome worms, the stench, hunger and thirst, the darkness, the chains, the unspeakable filth, the endless cries, the sight of the demons, Denis calls up all this before us like a nightmare. Still more oppressive is the insistence on psychic suffering: the mourning, the fear, the empty feeling of everlasting separation from God, the inexpressible hatred of God, the envy of the bliss of the elect; the confusion of all sorts of errors and delusions in the brain. And the thought that this is to last in all eternity is by ingenious comparisons wrought up to the fever-point of horror.

The treatise De quatuor hominum novissimis, from which these details are borrowed, was the customary reading during meal-time at the convent of Windesheim. A truly bitter condiment! But medieval man always preferred drastic treatment. He was like an invalid who has been treated too long with heroic medicines, only the most powerful stimulants produced an effect on him. In order to make some virtue shine in all its splendour, the Middle Ages present it in an exaggerated form, which a sedater moralist would perhaps regard as a caricature. Saint Giles praying God not to allow his wound caused by an arrow to heal is their pattern of patience. Temperance finds its models in saints who always mix ashes with their food, chastity in those who tested their virtue by sleeping beside a woman. If it is not some extravagant act, it is the extreme youth of the saint which marks him out as a model, Saint Nicholas refusing his mother’s milk on feast-days, or Saint Quiricus (a martyr, either three years