between the two tales of extra-claustral activity: “But for others it can turn out otherwise. Far more pitiful was what happened to a noble and robust man who was likewise a monk at the same place and who was similarly called back to arms by the very same necessity.”83 Aside from the increased attention to continuity, Walter has excised material deemed unnecessary. Gone is any discussion of the monk’s broken vow, a crucial element in the earlier story that concerns the efficacy of the monk’s repentance. Similarly, in the unrevised tale the monk attempts to make a truce with the enemy, but they double-cross him and secretly gather a large force to ambush him and his men. This betrayal sets the scene for the monk’s fateful battle and provides some extenuating circumstances for breaking his vow: it is only when the monk’s own men are in dire need that he decides to take up arms. However, in the revised tale Walter has apparently decided that all these details are superfluous, and he removes any trace of the attempted truce and the monk’s desperate situation. Instead, he quickly describes how the monk “suffered repeated reverses in battle with magnificent and unbroken spirit” and how he “rose again from defeat as if newborn to the fight; kindled as it were with quickened rage.”84 This compression curtails the nuances of the monk’s dilemma by excising any discussion about betrayal and any explanations for the monk’s breaking of his vow, with the result that the monk’s moral dilemma has disappeared completely. Instead, in its revised form in distinctio 1 this tale illustrates another dilemma, one closer to Walter’s everyday experiences in court: obtaining and keeping a peaceful, unharried life.
The first fifteen chapters of distinctio 1 do not concern moral quandaries or the afterlife. Indeed, although the court is the ostensible subject of these chapters, the theme that binds them all together is Walter’s frustrated quest for quies, “quiet.” The court, with its instability and torment, is the greatest manifestation of disquiet in Walter’s own life. But, as he admits while excusing his lord Henry, disquiet is a symptom not merely of the court but of the fallen world in general: “in this world nothing is free from disturbance [quietum], and no one is able to enjoy any kind of tranquillity [tranquillitate] for long.”85 Henry’s court, so Walter glibly claims, has inherited the ghostly wanderings of the ancient King Herla: “But from that time, that phantom circuit has been at peace [quieuit], as if they have passed down their wanderings to us for their own peace [quietem].”86 Ironically, the only place in the world that seems to have peace in Walter’s day is Jerusalem, where, after the defeat of the crusaders, Saladin and his forces “established peace [pacem] with the firmest of occupations, so that their will is now done on earth as it is in hell.”87
For Walter, the chaos of the court and the world at large is antithetical to literary pursuits; he admits no romantic notions about inspirational chaos. Walter replies to Geoffrey, the unknown and possibly fictional person urging him to write:
Writing poetry is for someone with a peaceful [quiete] as well as a collected [collecte] mind. Poets desire a completely safe abode [residenciam] where they can maintain a constant presence, and when the body and material wealth are at their peak, it will not do any good unless the mind is set at ease [tranquillus] by internal peace [interna pace]. Therefore, what you are asking of me, that an ignorant and inexperienced man write from this place, is no less a miracle than if you were to command new boys to sing from the furnace of another Nebuchadnezzar.88
Walter again accuses Geoffrey of handing him an impossible task in another passage: “And although the mother of our afflictions and nurse of our wrath surpasses others in its storminess, you command me to be a poet in the midst of these discords [discordias]?”89 Understandably, Walter is jealous of those men of letters who have the leisure and means to compose undisturbed. After singling out Gilbert Foliot, Bartholomew of Exeter, and Baldwin of Worcester, he writes, “These men are the philosophers of our time who lack nothing, who have abodes [residenciam] stuffed with every abundance and peace [pacem] outside: they have begun properly and will attain a good end. But where is a haven for me, who scarcely has the leisure to live?”90 These first fifteen chapters form a lament for the courtier-cleric with literary pretensions, and they end with the clearest symbols of the vita actiua and vita contempliua known to the medieval mind—Jesus’s visit to the house of Martha and Mary.91 Walter, it is clear, prefers the constancy and calmness of the vita contempliua. Yet the court, to which he is both “bound and banished,” refuses him peace and stability.92 Walter’s complaints about the difficulty of literary pursuits while in the court manifests what John Cotts has termed “the clerical dilemma”: “the balancing of the professional, educational, and spiritual concerns in an uneasy synthesis,” which is found in the writing of many twelfth-century secular clerics.93 Walter’s duties as a member of the court stymie (so he claims) his literary pretensions.
The two stories of the monks who leave Cluny to fight for their land exemplify the pressures of the secular world on those who would lead a life devoted to more elevated pursuits. Guichard’s new life at Cluny is a matter of envy for Walter: “when [Guichard] had obtained an easy living and taken up newfound quiet [quietem], he brought his strength together into an undivided mind, which had previously been distracted when he lived as a soldier [milicie secularis]; he suddenly felt himself to be a poet, and shining forth brilliantly in his own way, that is, in the French tongue, he became the Homer of the laity. Ah, if only there were such a truce for me, to keep the wandering through the many beams of a scattered mind from creating barbarisms!”94 Like Gilbert, Bartholomew, and Baldwin, Guichard’s literary productivity directly—almost miraculously—results from his withdrawal from the commotion of the world. After necessity forces him to revisit his life as a soldier, he returns to his vow and to the monastery without any complications. The nameless monk of Cluny, however, has no such luck. In the moment of his triumph, he is struck down by a covert enemy’s arrow, never again to enter the peaceful confines of Cluny. Revised and in a new context, the tale of the militant monk of Cluny offers a counterpoint to Guichard’s experience: leaving the cloister, or any peaceful refuge from the world, can be fatal.
Understandably, in rewriting this story Walter focuses not on the monk’s attempt at penance but on the dangers of the outside world. Moreover, the revised tale also acts as a transition in the larger narrative structure of distinctio 1. Up until this tale, the subject matter of the distinctio 1 almost exclusively concerns the court and the uneasy place of a writer in it. With the tale of the militant monk of Cluny, Walter begins to address the instability and tumult of the world outside the court. As in its original form, the tale ends with the militant monk asking for penance from a boy. However, in the revised version, Walter adds a few “words of mercy,” quoting a well-known phrase, “In whatever hour the sinner laments, he shall be saved.”95 Given such mercy, Walter wonders how the Lord could not grant the militant monk salvation. This concluding discussion of penance, mercy, and salvation allows Walter to transition to these same topics in the world at large. He begins with jubilee years, which are years of “forgiveness and grace, of safety and peace, of exultation and pardon, of praise and joy.”96 For Walter’s contemporaries, jubilee years—and the remission they offer—were closely associated with crusading. A few decades earlier, Bernard of Clairvaux had explicitly connected the two, and Walter has skillfully made use of this connection to move to the starkest reminder of instability in the late twelfth century—the fall of Jerusalem in 1187.97 Thus, with the newly revised tale of the militant monk of Cluny Walter moves from private penance to public penance, and from the instability of court to the instability of the world. It is worth noting that this section, too, ends with a smooth transition to the next section on monastic satire. After cataloging Saladin’s victory and the apparent absence of the Lord’s mercy, Walter wonders why the prayers of so many thousands of monks are unable to alter the current discord of the world. These monks say that they serve the Lord as Mary does, devoutly sitting at Christ’s feet in pursuit of the vita contempliua, but perhaps, Walter suggests, they are too involved with worldly pursuits. With these words the first half of distinctio 1, with its focus on quies and the court, ends, and Walter’s famous
