Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln: A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval EnglandMarson, Charles L. (Charles Latimer)
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Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln: A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England
Marson, Charles L. (Charles Latimer)
Hugh, of Lincoln, Saint, 1140-1200
"This is My Body." In earlier days, when Church thinkers were all
Platonists, or at least Realists, the verity of the Sacrament was the
Idea behind it. The concrete veils of that Idea were hallowed only by
their use, association, and impact. But when after the crusades
Aristotle was no longer the Bishop of Arians, but now the supreme
philosopher, the language hitherto natural to piety had either to be
changed or infused by violence with new senses, or both. The latter half
of the twelfth century saw this unhappy deadlock between history and
reason, and made strenuous efforts to compose the strife. So far as we
may judge, upon a difficult question, where little must be written and
much would be required to express an exact opinion, Hugh seems to have
held that by mystic sanctification the host is turned into Christ's
Body; that this conversion is not a sudden but a gradual one, until the
Son offers Himself anew, and hence the Sacrifice may be said to be
repeated. The story which illustrates this position best is that of the
young clerk who came to him at Buckden. The bishop had just been
dedicating a large and beautiful chalice and upbraiding the
heavily-endowed dignitaries for doing nothing at all for the poorly
served churches from which they drew their stipends. Then he said Mass,
and the clerk saw Christ in his hands, first as a little child at the
Oblation, when "the custom is to raise the host aloft and bless it"; and
again when it is "raised to be broken and consumed in three pieces," "as
the Son of the Highest offering Himself to the Father for man's
salvation." The clerk tells him of the double vision--the voucher of a
message sent by his late crusading father, who warned him to tell the
archbishop, through the Bishop of Lincoln, that the evil state of the
church must be amended. The message and the messenger seem to answer
exactly to the monk of Evesham, whose Dantesque revelations{18} are here
almost quoted. The wrath of God was incurred by the unchaste living
priests, who so behaved that the Sacraments were polluted, and by the
manner in which archdeacons and others trafficked in bribes. Hugh heard
the story at the altar, wept, dried the eyes of both, kissed the young
man and brought him into the meal afterwards, and urged him to become a
monk. This he did, and became the Monk of Evesham aforesaid. There is no
necessary advance in Eucharistic doctrine in this story, for a similar
vision was given to King Edward the Confessor, and Hugh was so reticent
about such things that his chaplain Adam never dared to ask him,
although he dreamed that he asked him and was snubbed for his pains.
"Although then, when you say, and more often, the Lord deigned to reveal
this and other things to me, what do you want in the matter?" In his
last journey to Jouay,{19} an old, feeble and withered priest, who would
not dine with him as the parish priest was wont, came to ask him to see
a wonder and to beg for his prayers. His story was that he, being in
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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