In spite of this excellent moral, however, Caesarius has very clear ideas himself as to the respective merits of certain saints; and, if we are to believe him, even St John the Evangelist was sometimes guilty of a scandalous neglect of duty:
“It is not long ago,” says he, “that a certain nun of the monastery of Rheindorf near Bonn, by name Elizabeth, went the way of all flesh. Now this monastery is of the rule of St Benedict the Abbot. But the said Elizabeth delighted specially in St John the Evangelist, lavishing on him all the honour she could. She had a sister in the flesh in the same monastery, who was called Aleidis. One night when the latter was sitting upon her bed after matins and saying the office of the dead for the soul of her sister, she heard a voice near her. And when she demanded who was there, the voice replied, ‘I am Elizabeth, thy sister.’ Then said she, ‘How is it with thee, sister, and whence comest thou?’ and it answered, ‘Ill indeed has it been with me, but now it is well.’ Aleidis asked, ‘Did St John in whom thou didst so ardently delight avail thee aught?’—and it replied, ‘Truly, naught. It was our holy father Benedict who stood by me. For he bent his knee on my behalf before God’”[1807].
St John the Evangelist, it will be perceived, suffered from the incalculable disadvantage of never having thought of founding a monastic order.
Caesarius narrates a great many other exempla concerning nuns, but I have quoted the most characteristic. There never was a book so full of meat; and it is greatly to be regretted that no translation has as yet placed it within the reach of all who are interested, not only in medieval life but in the medieval point of view[1808].
APPENDIX II
VISITATION OF NUNNERIES IN THE DIOCESE OF ROUEN BY ARCHBISHOP EUDES RIGAUD, 1248-1269
For twenty-seven years in the thirteenth century the Archbishopric of Rouen was held by a man who was at once a scholar and a man of action, a great saint and a great reformer. Eudes Rigaud (Odo Rigaldi), “the Model of Good Life,” as he was afterwards called, was among the most able and energetic churchmen produced by the middle ages. Salimbene, that gossiping friar of Parma to whom we owe perhaps the most entertaining chronicle of all the middle ages, describes him thus:
Now this Brother Rigaud was of our order [Franciscan] and one of the most learned men in the world. He had been doctor of theology in the convent [at Paris]: being a most excellent disputator and a most gracious preacher. He wrote a work on the Sentences; he was a friend of St Louis, King of France, who indeed laboured that he might be made Archbishop of Rouen. He loved well the Order of the Friars Preachers, as also his own of the Friars Minor and did them both much good; he was foul of face but gracious in mind and works, for he was holy and devout and ended his life well; may his soul, by God’s mercy, rest in peace[1809].