Part 29

And thus says Alban Butler of him:--“He never would admit of the least thing to give a savour to the herbs or meal-gruel on which he supported himself. If anything was brought him better dressed, he, for the greater self-denial, applied it to his nostrils, and said, ‘Oh Gluttony, Gluttony! thou shalt never taste this! Perpetual war is declared against thee!’” St. William of Maleval was of the same opinion when he cried because he ate his dry bread with a relish, and found that what he called “sensuality” was not inseparable from the coarsest food. St. Benedict of Anian, on the other hand, did not decline the use of a little wine, when it was given him; while St. Martinianus, again, lived upon biscuits and water, brought to him twice a-year--and very nasty fare it must have been towards the end of each six months. It must have been worse than that of St. Peter Damian, who prided himself on never drinking water fresh, and thought there was virtue in having it four-and-twenty hours old. St. Tarasius must have maintained a more decent table, for it is said of him that he used to take the dishes from it and give of them to the poor; and honour be to his name, because of his good sense and his charity! Our venerable acquaintance of the principality, St. David, was not half so wise, however well-intentioned; but St. Charles, Earl of Flanders, followed the better course, and not only lived moderately well, but acted better, by daily distributing seven hundred loaves to the poor. The Welsh saints, generally, kept as austere a table as St. David. There was, for instance, the cacophonous Winwaloe of Winwaloe, who kept his monks at starving point all the week, recalling them to life on Sundays by microscopic rations of hard cheese and shell-fish. His own fare was barley-bread strewn with ashes, and when Lent arrived, the quantity of ashes was doubled, in honour of the season! St. Thomas Aquinas was so abstracted that he never knew, at dinner, what he was eating, nor could remember, after it, if he had dined, which was likely enough. St. Frances, Widow, foundress of the Collations, was in more full possession of her wits; as, indeed, the lady saints were, generally. She had her little fancies indeed, which were “only charming Fanny’s way,” and her beverage at eve was dirty water, out of a human skull; but she had no mercy for lazy devotees, and invariably told sighing wives that they had active duties to perform, and that they had better keep out of monasteries, at least till they were widows. She was a good, humble woman; and, as a commentator says of the abstinence of St. Euphrasia, without humility these facts would be but facts of devils!

Another gleam of good sense shines upon us from the person of St. Benedict. He drank wine, and so did his monks of Vicovara, who liked his wine better than either the toast or sentiment with which he passed it round to them, and who tried to get rid of him by poisoning his glass; but the saint, full of inspired suspicion, made over it the sign of the cross, and away went the flask into fifty fragments. The taste of the good saint was known after he left Vicovara, and a pious soul once sent him a couple of bottles of wine by a faithless messenger, who delivered but one. “Mind what you are about,” said St. Benedict, “when you draw the other cork for yourself.” The knave was not abashed, but when he did secretly open the other bottle for the solace of his own thirsty throat, he found nothing therein but a lively serpent, which glided from him after casting at him a reproachful look!

If St. Benedict was right in the ordering of his table, why St. John of Egypt was wrong, for he never drank anything but stagnant water, nor ate anything cooked by fire; even his bread he complacently swallowed before it was baked;--and what his liver was like, it would puzzle any but a physician even to conjecture.

There was infinitely more sense in the table kept by an abbot of the compound Christian and Pagan title and name of St. Plato. He never ate anything but what had been raised or procured by the labour of his own hands; he was consequently never in debt with respect to his household expenses, and if all men so far followed the example of St. Plato, who was a better practical philosopher than his heathen namesake, what a happy world we should make of it! There would be fewer Christmas bills, and many more joyous dinners, not only at Christmas, but all the year round!

St. Plato deserves our respect; he would not live on alms. He was more useful in his generation than the men who, like St. Aphraates, were content to exist on the eleemosynary contributions of the faithful, or than those who, like Zozimus and his followers, wandered through the desert, trusting to chance and calling it providence. What, compared with our friend Plato, was that St. Droun, the so-called patron of shepherds, who during forty years taught them nothing, and lived on the barley-bread which they brought him in return for his instruction.

I have given one or two instances of the spare tables kept by a few of our ancient bishops; I may here add to them the name of St. Elphege, some time Bishop of Winchester, and subsequently Archbishop of Canterbury. The smell of roast meat was never known in his palace on any but “extraordinary occasions.” This, however, is a very indefinite term, and the table of this primate may have been one to make a cardinal give unctuous thanks for rich mercies, five days out of the seven. There was certainly gastronomic work to do in some of the ancient godly households, or St. James of Sclavonia would not have passed so many years in one, as he did, in the capacity of cook, “improving” the occasion, by drawing ideas of hell from his own fires, which were for ever roasting savoury joints, like those which strike the visitors with awe and appetite in the kitchens at Maynooth.

If in some houses there were busy kitchens, in others there were soft couches, whereon digestion might progress. Thus Adalbert, Bishop of Prague, was a Saint and Martyr; and it is said, that he had a most comfortable bed in his dormitory, but that he never slept upon it! Then, what was the bed for? It is added, that he fasted in private, with great severity,--but it is no more “of faith” to believe this, than it is that he slept every night on the floor, under, and not upon, his own excellent feather-bed; for what says the old refrain?--

“A notre coucher Un lit, des draps blancs, Une ---- digue daine, bon! Voila la vie que ces moines font!”

But he may have been a profane fellow who wrote these rude rhymes; and we will no more implicitly trust him, than we will the prose historians of the doings and dealings of the saintly men.

It is not an unusual thing to find wine-bibbers mentioned among the members of holy communities; where wine was generally supposed to be a luxury never employed but for the service of the altar,--and perhaps of the sick. The venerable Bede tells a story of a “brother,” whom he had known, and whom he wishes to God he had never known, and who was given to worship the spigot. Bede does not give his name, but certifies that the too jolly friar lived ignobly in a noble monastery, where he was often reproved for his acts of drunkenness, and only tolerated because of his gifts,--not spiritual, but as a carpenter. He was a terrible tippler, but a hard workman to boot, and would, at any time, rather labour all day and all night at his bench than join the brethren in chapel. Indeed, when he did go, his thoughts were running on something else. He was like the profane Yorkshire farmer, who praised the institution of the Sabbath because it not only brought roast beef with it as a sacred observance, but it authorized him to attend in his pew at church, where, said he, “I puts up my legs and thinks o’ nothing!” Bede’s carpenter was characteristically punished for his bibbing; and the story was made much of, by way of monition to others. It was to this effect:--“He, falling sick, and being reduced to extremity, called the brethren, and with much lamentation, and like one damned, began to tell them that he saw hell open, and Satan at the bottom thereof, and also Caiaphas, with the others that slew our Lord, by him delivered up to avenging flames. ‘In whose neighbourhood,’ said he, ‘I see a place of eternal perdition prepared for me, miserable wretch that I am!’ The brothers, hearing these words, began seriously to exhort him that he should repent even then, while he was in the flesh. He answered in despair,--‘I have no time now to change my course of life, when I have myself seen my judgment passed.’ When he had uttered these words, he died, without having received the saving _viaticum_; and his body was buried in the remotest part of the monastery; nor did any one dare to say masses, sing psalms, or even to pray for him.” Which seems a very hard case; for if any one needed such service it was he; and the Church’s ability to extricate him could not be denied, when she was duly pre-paid for the service.

Curiously enough, St. Monica, the mother of St. Augustin, ranks among the wine-bibbers. Her pious parents left their children to be brought up by a servant-maid, who had more zeal than discretion, and who would allow none of the children to drink, were they ever so thirsty, except at meal-times, and then only a drop or two of water. “If you cannot restrain your desire to drink now,” she would say, “what will it be when you have wine at command?” Now, the effect of this speech was exactly like that of the confessor to the hostler, when he asked the latter, if he never greased the horses’ teeth in order to prevent them eating their corn. It gave the young Monica a new idea. She was accustomed to draw the wine for her father’s table, and she henceforth began to drink a portion each time that she went to the cellar with her pitcher. And I do not know that Mr. Millais, or any other of the pre-Raphaelite gentlemen, could have a better subject for a picture, than that representing the scene when the horrified nurse-maid beheld her young charge indulging in her cups in the parental wine-vault. The lecture she received worked her conversion, we are told; and she married, and became the mother of St. Augustin, who so far followed the maternal example that, in his earlier years, when, with his eyes upon heaven, his heart was with the good things of the earth, his commonest prayer used to be, “Lord, make me religious, _but not just yet_.”

The nurse-maid of Monica deserved to have been the wife,--and perhaps she was,--of St. Theodotus, the vintner of Ancyra. He was a teetotaller who kept a tavern, and who passed the live-long day in leaning over his counter and begging his customers not to drink! Well, men have been canonized for less useful service to their kind; and Theodotus was more worthily employed in keeping drunkards from his wine-casks, than St. Pius V. was when, every day before dinner, by way of mocking his appetite, he resorted to the public hospitals, and kissed the ulcers of the patients! Nay, biographers tell us that an English Protestant gentleman was _suddenly converted_ to Romanism, by observing the condescension and affection with which Pius kissed the ulcers on the feet of some poor men! The pope, if he and the convert dined together after this nasty ceremony, might have confessed that he had been sore put to it for an argument that should carry conviction to an English gentleman in search of a religion.

Let us contrast this pope in his pride with a cardinal in his fall. “When Wolsey,” says Mr. Hunter the antiquary, “was dismissed by his tyrannical master to his northern diocese, he passed many weeks at Scrooby. It is a pleasing picture which his faithful servant, Cavendish, gives of him at this period of his life:--‘Ministering many deeds of charity, and attending on Sundays at some parish church in the neighbourhood; hearing or saying mass himself, and causing some one of his chaplains to preach to the people; and that done, he would dine in some honest house of that town, where should be distributed to the poor a great alms, as well of meat and drink, as of money to supply the want of sufficient meat, if the number of the poor did so exceed of necessity.’” Wolsey was no saint certainly, but he was as honest a man as Pius, and a wiser when he fed the poor rather than kiss their ulcers.

But there is no accounting for taste; the Russian Boniface used to roll himself among thorns and nettles, in order to get an appetite, or to punish himself for indulging over much. St. Germanus, on the other hand, commenced every repast by putting ashes into his mouth;--the modern custom of beginning with oysters is certainly better both for taste and stomach. St. Walthen took wine, but then he put spiders in it. St. Dominic, too, was singular in his diet, and he sometimes spent his half-hour before dinner in one of the most curious positions that gentlemen could possibly fix upon. The Abbot of St. Vincent’s one day desired his company at dinner, but at the usual hour the saint was in church, and had forgotten the invitation. In the meantime the turkey and chine were spoiling, and the hungry abbot despatched a monk in quest of the loiterer; the messenger hurried to the church, where, to his very considerable astonishment, he beheld St. Dominic “ravished in an ecstasy,” whatever that may mean, “raised several cubits above the ground, and without motion.” The Saint, on being told that dinner was ready, graciously smiled at the intelligence, and gently descended to the ground.

St. Laurence would have joked at this, as he did at his own grilling. After he had lain for some time extended on his gridiron, he calmly said to the executioner, “Will you have the kindness to turn me, as I am quite done on the under side?” The executioner, a trifle astonished, did as he was required, and soon after, the Saint, again speaking, said, “I shall be obliged if you’ll take me up, as I am now fit for eating.” This story reminds me of the remark made by an Irishman, when first told that St. Patrick had crossed the ocean on a millstone:--“I can’t contradict it! He was a lucky fellow!”

We are told of St. Bernard, who used to walk before dinner on the banks of the Lake of Lausanne, that on hearing two of his monks speak of the beauty of the lake, he declared that no such lake existed, or he had been too much absorbed ever to have noticed it. So the Trappists used to glory in not knowing where or how they dined, or recollecting anything about it! All this shows less wisdom at table than was exhibited by the royal St. Louis, who, when a certain friar began to discuss doctrinal subjects with the pullets, stopped him with the remark that “all things had their time, and joking was good sauce with chickens!”

St. Laurence Justinian, the first patriarch of Venice, was far less indulgent than the royal saint of France. He was so little so, that when his thirsty monks sometimes asked for a little wine, declaring that their throats felt as dry as the high road in summer, he used quite as drily to remark, that if they could not bear parched throats now, what would they do in the fires of purgatory? St. John the Dwarf, Anchoret of Scete, cared as little for wine as St. Laurence, but he was fond of fruit, and he obtained a supply from a strange source. An old hermit bade him plant his walking-staff in the ground, and he not only did so, but he watered it regularly for three years, when it bore pippins, sweeter than those that grew at Ribstone up to the time of the death of the late baronet. Before this miraculously-bearing stick the little man used to read prayers as devoutly as Sir Hollyoak Goodrick, the present Ribstone baronet, does to the villagers in his own parish church, and for the same reason each had much to be thankful for. It must be confessed that John the Dwarf had more taste than his namesake of Cupertino, who not only ate nothing but vegetables, but ate no vegetables that any other human being could be induced to swallow. It was such garbage as only pigs would condescend to. _Arcades ambo_--nasty creatures both!

St. Francis of Assisium exhibited something more of true humility at his table, with a touch of the false metal notwithstanding. He ate nothing dressed by fire, unless he were very ill, and even then he covered it with ashes, or dipped it in cold water. His common daily food was dry bread strewn with ashes; but this founder of the Friars’ Minors had the good sense not to condemn his followers to the rigorous diet he observed himself; and “Brother Ass,” as he familiarly called that self, was in his own opinion worthy of no better fare.

There was a founder of another community who exhibited more singularity than St. Francis, who, despite some mistakes, was a man of whom none other dare speak but with respect,--St. Ammon, founder of the hermitages of Nitria. At the age of twenty-two this young Egyptian noble married a fair girl of Memphis; and instead of a nuptial banquet, he treated his bride to a reading of a particularly edifying chapter from St. Paul, after which he withdrew to solitary meditation. During eighteen years he occupied himself in training balsam-trees all day, after which he returned home to a supper of fruit and herbs; then came that terrible reiteration of advice from St. Paul, followed by a separate solitary comment on the part of this exemplary pair. At the end of the time above specified, he retired altogether from domestic life, and settled alone on Mount Nitria, and his biographers naïvely remark, this was “with his wife’s consent.” This saint was of such a “complexion” of virtue, that one day, on accidentally catching sight of an uncovered portion of his own body, he was so shocked that he fainted away. If he had only read “Erasmus Wilson, on the Skin,” he would have learned to look oftener at his own, and would have been a cleaner man, a better husband, a more grateful feeder, and an improved Christian.

But St. Bruno, the founder of the Carthusians, probably exceeded all other originators of communities in the “fierceness,” so to speak, of his dietetic laws; he never spared himself, nor his disciples. A Carthusian is never permitted to eat meat under any pretence whatever. In addition to this, they fast eight months in the year, and I suppose they starve in Lent, for during that season they are forbidden to eat what is called “white meats,” that is, eggs, milk, butter, and cheese. Dry bread with water is their Lenten fare; and a peculiar law connected with them is, that they can never change into another order, because they would thereby profit a little in the way of better living; but a brother of any other order may become a Carthusian, as thereby he increases his mortifications and diminishes his diet. Of course from these remarks the Carthusians of the “Charterhouse” are excepted. If the thin spirit of St. Bruno ever scents the juicy viands that adorn the well-spread table _there_, it probably melts into thin air by the very force of disgust or ghastly envy.

The table kept by St. Bridget, when she married Ulpho, prince of Nericia, in Sweden, was a very modest one for so princely a pair, but what was spared thereby was given to the poor. Bridget and Ulpho, she sweet sixteen, he two years more, read every evening the soothing chapter from St. Paul, which formed the favourite study of St. Ammon and his wife; but, as it would appear, with indifferent success. “They enrolled themselves,” say their various biographers, “in the Third Order of St. Francis, and lived in their own house as if it had been a regular and austere monastery.” The biographers immediately add without comment,--“They afterwards had eight children: four boys and four girls;” and as the same paragraph goes on to state that “all these children were favoured with the blessings of divine grace,” it may be fairly concluded that a domestic observation of a monastic regularity and austerity, is a course that will purchase blessings and olive-branches.

The case of St. Gomer and his wife, the Lady Gwinmary, may perhaps be cited as an exception. But this Gwinmary was an exacting lady at all times, and when St. Gomer betook himself from her to live in the desert on bitterness and biscuits, he fared as sumptuously and lived far more quietly than he had done at home. He was one of the most placid of saints, and it is a positive libel upon him for the French Admiralty to have given his name to one of the most thundering steamers in the service. Its broadsides far more nearly resemble the tongue of Gwinmary than the tones of Gomer.

In charming contrast with this truculent Gwinmary do we meet and greet the gentle St. Elizabeth of Hungary. The record of her good deeds would fill a volume, but out of them I have only to select an exquisite table trait--to register which is also to eulogize it. I do not allude to her habitual temperance, to her dry bread and thimble-full of wine, when she sat at meat with kings and queens, her equals in birth; nor to her small feasts with her two maids, in the absence of her consort, Louis the Landgrave; but I allude--and listen, O ye Benedicts, with grateful rapture--to the fact “that the kitchen she kept out of her own private purse, not to be the least charge to her husband.” If celibate priests, who can hardly be supposed capable of appreciating such a fact, canonized so rare a lady, all married men who love banquets but dislike the butchers’ bills, will cry “Well done!” and recommend their wives to read the instructive life of Elizabeth of Hungary.