A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [303]
Louis d’Orléans, bent on replacing his uncle of Burgundy as the dominant figure of the realm, wanted the command and showered gifts on influential nobles in the hope of acquiring it. His uncle exerted enough influence to keep it from him, on the grounds of Louis’ youth and inexperience, thus adding more fuel to their rivalry. Burgundy had too many interests at stake at home to want to leave the country; Berry was out of favor and not a warrior. The Duc de Bourbon, eager to find glory in the footsteps of St. Louis, who had died on the shores of Tunis in his last crusade, was accordingly chosen, with Coucy as second in command.
In the gesture of a great prince, Coucy established a church and monastery before his departure. Since the religious life was acknowledged as superior to the secular, the founding of a religious institution was a way of partaking in the extra merit of the Church. Besides, as the Duke of Burgundy said when he founded a Carthusian monastery at Champmol in 1385, “For the soul’s salvation nothing suffices like the prayers of pious monks.”
Coucy chose the Célestin Order, whose extremities of renunciation had made it so paradoxically the favorite of a nobility steeped in worldliness. Was the preference indeed paradox, or was it spiritual discomfort and a need for penitence in a life so far removed from the principles it professed? The duality of life under the Christian faith showed itself in Louis d’Orléans’ hastening from riches and pleasures and political intrigue to stony vigils in the Célestin cloister. Sharing the monks’ austerities relieved the pricking of self-disgust. Even the Count of Foix, a hard-headed materialist well acquainted with wrath, vainglory, and other sins, composed his own “Book of Prayers” in which he acknowledged the great suffering that results from coming to believe that “God no longer exists and that good and evil fortunes come from the nature of things, without God being there. After that comes death, the death of body and soul.”
Whatever solace the Christian faith could give was balanced by the anxiety it generated. In this anxiety, Chaucer toward the end of his life, in his envoy to the Parson’s Tale, was moved to “revoke” his life’s work—The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, The Book of the Duchess, and all the poems that were not pious—and to beg Christ to forgive him for writing these “worldly vanities … so that I may be one of those at the day of doom that shall be saved.” Christianity held a tragic power indeed if the need for salvation could lead a man to recant his own creation.
The 13th century founder of the Célestin Order had as a youth chosen a hermit’s life in a cave in order to devote himself to God while achieving the most complete renunciation of self and nature compatible with life. He had spent sixteen hours a day in prayer, wearing a hair shirt and fasting on water and cabbage leaves through six “Lents” of forty days each during the year. Attracting disciples and fame, he succumbed to election as Pope Célestin V; then, in bitter repentance, and in an act unique for the papacy, resigned, to return to self-affliction and the search for God. The order named for him, growing in favor with popes and kings, was exempted from tithes and authorized to grant 200 years of indulgences to truly penitential persons who visited its convents on holy days.
There is no evidence that Coucy made a habit of visits to the Order and none at all to suggest that he was a man troubled in spirit. In all likelihood, his choice did not reflect any burden of anxiety so much as the fact that the greater austerities practiced by the Célestin monks gave greater assurance of salvation to their patrons.
His charter, dated April 26, 1390, opens with the characteristic self-assurance of the Coucys: “Considering that the pilgrimage and the temporal and worldly goods of this transitory life are ordered among those who can, and know how, best to use and edify