The Justification of the Saint

Other hagiographical devices designed to validate the subject of the Life as a saint are seen in the death and burial accounts. The sanctity of the late monk is endorsed via scriptural reference, which is used in the Lives both explicitly and allusively. Ailred’s last words, the final words of the crucified Christ, are a direct quotation from the gospel of Luke, 23:46. Likewise, Walter, reflecting on the beauty and purity of Ailred’s dead 329 body, inserts into his account an allusion to the psalms. ‘My God! He did not die in darkness, as those that have been long dead, not so, Lord, but in your light, for in his [Ailred’s] light we see your light.’ While the use of scripture is not seen much in 330 Anselm’s death narrative, Eadmer did use it in in the miracles which occurred after Anselm’s death. Eadmer recounts a vision experienced by a monk of the abbey of Saints Peter and Paul and Augustine, in which the monk saw Anselm received into heaven. This vision which occurred at the time at which Anselm was dying, quotes from Psalm 41. ‘Behold, he whom you await is at hand. Receive him, and lead him where the Lord has ordained, with the voice of joy and praise.’ Scriptural references are manifold 331 throughout the death accounts. In a monastic setting where the daily office was rich in scripture, these allusions and quotes provided a familiar mechanism for the recipients of a Life, a link using God’s own words and His message to the faithful which endorsed their belief in their holy man as a saint. Heaven and earth were in a sense conjoined during the time of dying, and God’s words to the community of faith, delivered through the medium of scripture, held a particular potency and significance when received at the time of death.

C. W. Bynum and P. Freedman, (eds.), Last Things: Death and the Apocalypse in the Middle Ages

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(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), p. 12. ‘In manus tuas commendo spiritum meum.’ VAil, lvii, p. 61.

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‘Deus meus, non obit ille sic ut mortui seculi, non, Domine, in obscuris set in lumine tuo, quia in

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lumine vidimus lumen tuum.’ VAil, lviii, p. 63. Italics (Powicke’s) denote the use of a quote from psalm 142:3. ‘For the enemy has persecuted my soul: he has brought down my life to the earth. He has made me to dwell in darkness as those that have been dead of old.’

‘Ecce, adest quem expectatis, suscipite illum, et quo Dominus iussit efferte in voce laudis et

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When Gilbert’s biographer chose to compare Gilbert to Thomas Becket he was using another recognised hagiographical device, that of endorsing the sanctity of the subject of the Life by associating them with an already acknowledged saint. While Martin of 332 Tours was a saint commonly used in this manner, as is seen in the Lives and deaths of both Ailred and Hugh, the choice of Thomas Becket as a hagiographical model in the Life of Gilbert is particularly interesting In this case, the linking of the subject of the 333

Life with an acknowledged saint was not just a means to endorse the sanctity of the former but also perhaps a polemical statement. It also carried a value in the hagiographical economy. In Gilbert’s Life, the hagiographer states that the value of a life lived as a confessor is as great as that of martyrdom, and a life spent winning souls is as meritorious as is sacrificing ones life for one’s flock. One of the first postmortem 334 miracles attributed to Gilbert was achieved through the drinking of the water used to wash his body after death, the same miracle that was seen in the aftermath of Thomas’s death, and which contributed to his being hailed as a saint. Thomas’s death two 335 decades before that of Gilbert had resulted in a significant and lucrative cult for the cathedral at Canterbury. Gilbert’s hagiographer appears to be making the link between the acknowledged saint Thomas Becket and the recently dead Gilbert as per standard hagiographical practice, but, unlike the other Lives, instead of describing similarities between the two men, the dissimilarities are appraised. It is only in Gilbert and Thomas’s Englishness that the author considers them as equivalent. The link with the Canterbury saint is achieved through equating the relative values and actions of a confessor and a martyr and itemising the different characteristics of each. Not only is the hagiographer writing to justify his championing of Gilbert through using another English saint, but he could be considered to be elevating Gilbert to the detriment of

‘Inter quos, dies nostris, in regione nostra, post beati Thome Cantuariensis martiris admiranda

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constantie exempla, habemus in beato Gileberto Sempringhamensi confessore amplectenda zeli animarum rudimenta.’ BSG, Prologue, pp. 2-3. Gilbert’s biographer was seeking to place Gilbert in the model of Becket, equating the worth of martyrdom with a life lived in virtue.

For the description of Hugh and Ailred in the model of Martin of Tours, see particularly MV, V, xvii,

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vol. II, pp. 199-208 and VAil, lviii, pp. 62-64, and for Martin of Tours as a common model for medieval sainthood see Ward, Miracles, p. 168. For the explicit linking of Thomas Beckett with Gilbert, see BSG,

Prologue, pp. 2-3.

‘In illo discimus quanti sit meriti animam propriam pro ovibus sui dare, in isto novimus quanta sit

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merces animas proximorum lucrifacere.’ BSG, pp. 2-3. BSG, 55, p. 131.

Thomas, while using the model of Thomas the saint, in an attempt to set up Gilbert too as the object of a cult.

As well as relating a picture of the perfect monk, justified through scriptural allusion and by similarity to acknowledged saints, all the Lives contain, to some extent or another, an apologist element. The authors used their descriptions of the ideal monastic death as part of their defence of the saint against detractors. This is seen explicitly in Eadmer’s closing statements in Anselm’s Life, when he records that he is writing with regard to the ‘unbelief of certain men who to this day with jaundiced minds are your detractors’. 336