Discussion on Guibert of Nogent - Essay Example

Download file to see previous pages ...but when reason returns, I repent that I have yielded to the lust of my heart when my soul with unwilling heaviness sinks on a dunghill for its bed (Bland, 1)."
There is a deep seated desire to know the will of God and to know him, rather the person should empty himself and come to know his Creator. Reading through the monk's memoirs, he sees that the culture around him is submerged in wealth and sin. And all that learning is of no use it the person does not open his heart to the Lord Jesus Christ. "...Unless Christ shall open to him the doors of learning with the key of knowledge, without doubt every teacher shall spend himself in vain on dull ears. Therefore, let every wise man be foolish to claim anything as his own but sin (Bland 2)."
Everything is associated with the holy feasts and the days they fall on as a symbol of some divine meaning of why things occurred. "Now the feast of the Blessed Martin was close at hand, in fact the next day (Bland 14)."
A person suffers a fate or misfortune because divine intervention has decided to punish the individual for his or her wrong doings-"the man who tries to please a treacherous foe in fear of being bitten, by the just judgment of heaven gets hurt by him and everyone else (Bland 14)." Heaven's decision in the matter is seen as fair and just. The air of Christianity is soaked to the brim with guilt and punishment, justice and retribution although there are numerous times in Guibert's writings where he mentions the mercies of the Lord and his mother's help in our daily lives.
The prevailing feature of Christianity in Guibert's time as Guibert saw them was either a person knew the Christian faith and lived by its rules or they didn't and hence committed sacrilegious acts by their very nature of being ignorant in matters of what constitutes as holy and requiring reverence. "And since such words may not be uttered by a Christian's lips, and must cause pious ears to shudder with detestation, we suppress them. Although he praised the Jews , by the Jews he was regarded as a madman and whilst approving their religion in word, he actually practiced ours (Bland 16)." Even profanity was considered as intolerable to ears that were sensitive to them and considered such speech as not characteristic with the Christian faith and contrary to the Christian life. And when man could not do much to intervene or stop the particular person from carrying on with their blasphemies, we see through Guibert that heaven itself takes care of the problem :"When the Virgin Mother, Queen of all, could no longer endure the blasphemies of this corrupt man, as he was entering from a royal expedition, on approaching the city, there appeared a great band of his friends the devils and he coming home with his hair disordered and out of his wits, repulsed his wife and lay with that old woman and that night fell ill of a mortal disease (Bland 17)."
Furthermore, there resounds in the 1100s the echo of what beauty is to the individual, the abbot asks us to be more concerned with the beauty of the soul than the appearance of the body. Bland depicts how Guibert of Nogent asks God to infuse beauty with ...Download file to see next pagesRead More