Magisterial Monkish Asses

In the Middle Ages, no one was more critical of monastic institutions than monks themselves. Biting exercises in satire, both in Latin and the vernacular, remind us that monkish tendencies toward pedantry were frequently targets of castigation, especially in the tradition of “beast literature.”

Stories about animals offered imagery that was accessible to broader, less educated audiences. Such stories had a long tradition of facilitating social criticism and offered the author considerable flexibility and freedom. Donkeys in particular became popular as representations of monks deluded by vain or excessive scholarly ambitions.

Carcophas the Ass, a pompous, irritable, and incompetent schoolmaster, plays a small but entertaining role in Ysengrimus, arguably the first full-fledged beast epic, probably composed around 1150 in the Flemish town of Ghent. The poem revolves around the hostility between the greedy wolf-monk Ysengrimus and the cunning fox Reynard, ultimately leading to the former’s death. It proceeds from the story about the sick lion, the king of the animal world. Pretending to be a doctor, Ysengrimus advises the king to eat the flesh of a sheep and a goat. These animals, however, enlist the help of Reynard, who counsels the king to take a sweating cure by covering himself in the skin of a wolf that is three and a half years old. Since Ysengrimus is older than this, he is not aware (unlike the other animals and the public) that he in fact is to be the victim of this scheme. Through various subtle tricks by Reynard, Ysengrimus’s age becomes the subject of a debate, ultimately leading to his flaying to provide the king with his coat.

The schoolmaster Carcophas appears in the context of the debate about Ysengrimus’s age. Reynard brings him up as a witness to prove his claim that Ysengrimus is in fact three and a half years old. Carcophas at first suggests he will help the wolf. He presents himself with a thundering voice as a magister, a “patron of learning,” and “scholarship personified.” Yet his knowledge is incoherent and unreliable. He introduces himself as coming from Étampes, “between Easter and Rheims,” and explains his name with a far-fetched etymology as “Peter barking at learning,” derived from ars and Cephas as Aramaic for Peter, with a “barking” letter C in front of it, instead of the more obvious link to the Latin verb carcare, “to carry a load,” in keeping with the standard role of the ass. When Carcophas begins to test Ysengrimus’s knowledge, his short temper becomes clear. “Aren’t you answering?” he hisses. “You wicked rogue, take off your skin! Beat him! Who has the canes? I’ll skin the dog alive!”

Another donkey, Burnellus, stars as the main character in The Mirror of Fools. Written probably shortly before 1180 by Nigel of Longchamp, a monk at Christ Church in Canterbury, and dedicated to William of Longchamp (no relation), bishop of Ely (and later chancellor of England), the poem tells the story of Burnellus, who, dissatisfied with his short tail, goes in search of a longer one. His travels lead him to encounter a series of deceptions. A physician first sends him to Salerno, home of the greatest medical school at the time, to procure imaginary medicines. Unable to find the ingredients, he is duped by an English merchant into buying some expensive jars of fake substances. These he subsequently loses during a violent altercation with a Cistercian monk near Lyon on his journey home. Having lost part of his tail in the process, Burnellus does not want to return home, so he develops an alternative plan to feel better. He travels to Paris to study. His ambition is to start with the liberal arts for a period of ten years, then to pursue a law degree in Bologna, and to complete the program with theology.

Burnellus’s eagerness for the title of “master” indicates his vain presumption. He believes it will bring him respect and authority:

So I’ll have a title added to my name, and shall be called “Master Burnellus,” in both name and fact. If anybody should happen to say “Burnellus” and doesn’t add “Master,” he’ll be my avowed enemy. So, the dazzling renown of my name will go before me, and I shall succeed as public orator, without equal. The senate and people will come to meet me; the common folk will run forward, crying “Behold, the Master is here!” The united opinion of the bishop and the monks will willingly be governed by my advice and assistance. What I decree in the city will stand firm, and my words will have the force of law. What I am lacking in my tail, and have to excess in my ears, will then be compensated for by the honour of my name.

Of course, the entire project comes to nothing. After seven years of study, much toil, and many beatings of the rod, Burnellus still has not learned anything beyond saying “Heehaw.” The ass realizes his mistake. “What madness drove me to come to this region,” he laments dramatically, “and to the schools of Paris?”

Besides representing scholarship as an empty ambition, The Mirror of Fools also satirizes anti-intellectual criticism. When Burnellus, upon leaving Paris, has forgotten the name of the town (remembering in the end only the syllable “pa”), his initial embarrassment soon gives way to a self-serving justification that echoes the spiritual concerns about worldly learning common among the monastic critics of the schools. “Knowledge has often led many astray,” he argues, “and caused them to be more puffed up.”

Having decided that advanced education “breeds disgust,” he suddenly decides to become a monk. But what order should he join? He weighs extensively the pros and cons of a range of existing orders, concluding that he should found a new one. Under his new monastic rule, he can bring together the best of all the other orders: the horses of the Templars, the diet of the Cluniacs, the lack of silence of the order of Grandmont, the sartorial indulgence of the Premonstratensians, and so forth.

Here Burnellus’s belated objections to learning recall spiritual concerns expressed earlier by Bernard of Clairvaux. They can be seen as a prelude to the criticism brought to bear by a growing number of mystical thinkers who viewed union with God as their ultimate spiritual aim. While traditionally, mystical thinkers in the Latin West had used a variety of terms to describe the direct experience of God (such as “contemplation,” “vision,” or “ecstasy”), a distinct shift of interest to the notion of union can be seen in the twelfth century. Driving forces behind this were members of the new orders of the Victorines and the Cistercians. The tendency was further strengthened by new access to Greek patristic treatises, particularly those of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (especially his De mystica theologia).

Dionysius, a sixth-century theologian mistakenly identified as Dionysius of Athens, whose conversion by Paul was recorded in the New Testament, wrote a number of treatises on mystical union. For him it formed the ultimate stage of a process of spiritual development involving purification, illumination, and perfection. Combining Neoplatonist thought with Christianity, he conceived of steps of development through the senses and reasoning, but the ultimate step of union was beyond either of these, beyond human cognition, requiring instead a negative (or apophatic) approach, characterized by a process of unknowing.

Following this approach to union, medieval mystical thinkers typically regarded the human intellect as a problematic instrument for reaching God. They disagreed, however, about the precise status of the intellect and its significance. In fact, they articulated their criticism of overly intellectual scholars often in the context of debates about the relative positions of loving and knowing in the quest for attaining God. Emphasizing the significance of love and devotion, some declared knowledge to be a hurdle. In De theologia mystica, the late-thirteenth-century Carthusian Hugh of Balma, for example, regarded love as ultimately the only means to reach God. Union required a mortification of the intellect, so that the soul could be elevated mindlessly and ignorantly to “the brightness of the Divine Incomprehensibility.” Hugh’s purely affective, non-cognitive conception of mystical union proved influential, triggering more sustained criticism of scholastic theologians over the next two centuries.

A mystical perspective thus inevitably lowered the bar for what constituted excessive intellectualism and hence pedantry. The author of The Cloud of Unknowing, an anonymous priest writing in Middle English in the fourteenth century, seeks to guide initiates in the contemplative life toward spiritual union with God. It suggests a process of gradual ascent consisting of two steps. First, aspirants are encouraged to open their hearts to God and discover the “cloud of unknowing,” marked by a complete dependence on the love of God. Related to this, the second step requires them to reject worldly things by placing a “cloud of forgetting” between themselves and all that is created. According to the author, many clerks and theologians fail to understand the limited place of knowledge in spiritual ascent. They engage in “subtle speculation and learning,” which gives rise to pride and curiosity, provoking in them a desire “to be known not as humble clerics and masters of divinity or of devotion, but proud scholars of the devil and masters of vanity and falsehood.” Indeed, reliance on “the cleverness of their natural understanding and academic learning” quickly leads to heresy. Focused on their ability to understand, they “incline too much to their own opinion,” the author explains, and “desert the common teaching and counsel of holy Church.” These polemical jibes serve to point out the spiritual dangers of placing too much trust in reason.

We see a more intellectual form of mysticism in the late Middle Ages, amid the emerging signs of the new classical revival of Renaissance humanism. The German cardinal and philosopher Nicholas Cusanus introduces the concept of “learned ignorance” to offer a synthesis between the extremes of purely affective or intellectual ascent to God. In a letter to the Benedictine abbot Kaspar Ayndorffer from 1452, he explains his position regarding radically affective mysticism. In his view, the act of loving requires a degree of knowledge, since one can only love what is good. The essence of the good itself, however, is beyond comprehension. “There is, then,” he concludes, “a coincidence of knowledge and ignorance, or a learned ignorance.” In a subsequent letter, he lays out his position in more detail by means of Dionysius’s mystical theology, explaining in particular his ideas about overcoming dichotomies. Neither “negative theology” nor “affirmative theology” is ultimately a correct or open way to come to God. According to Cusanus, Dionysius’ teaching goes beyond disjunction (either affirmatively or negatively) to “combination and coincidence, that is, to the most simple union that is not one-sided.” This, he believes, is key to mystical theology, but it is inaccessible to the scholastic philosopher “as long as the principle common to all philosophy is in force, that is, that two contradictories do not coincide.”

Nuanced as his position may seem, Cusanus remains apprehensive of the risks of pedantic arrogance. Real wisdom does not require scholarly knowledge; in fact, such learning may even be an obstacle to it. Cusanus could not have made his point more clearly than in the dialogue Idiota de sapientia (“The Layman on Wisdom”), dating from 1450, between a poor layman and a rich orator, set in an imaginary market square. In the opening scene, the layman addresses the orator by reproving his pride. “Perusing countless books you tire yourself with continual reading,” he notes, but despite all this “you have not yet been brought to a state of humility.” The orator is astonished at the layman’s directness and responds in a condescending way: “O poor, utterly unschooled Layman, what is this presumption of yours [that leads] you thus to make light of the study of written learning, without which study no one makes progress?” Still, it is the learned expert who needs instruction, albeit of another kind. Cusanus has the layman explain the difference between authoritative, bookish knowledge and natural knowledge. The orator, he teaches, is like a horse that is kept in the stable, depending on others to be fed: “For your intellect, restricted to the authority of writings, is fed by strange and unnatural food.” The layman represents the natural approach. Precisely because he knows himself to be “unlearned,” the layman is aware, he is humble and therefore may well be more learned in fact than the proud orator:

ORATOR: Since you are a layman, how are you able to be led to a knowledge of your ignorance?
LAYMAN: Not from your books but from God’s books.
ORATOR: Which books are they?
LAYMAN: Those that He wrote with His finger.
ORATOR: Where are they found?
LAYMAN: Everywhere.

Bookish learning is of limited value, Cusanus’s dialogue makes clear, because it is worldly. Secular knowledge all too easily leads believers astray. It distracts them from the spiritual goals that matter most. Like so many mystical thinkers before him, Cusanus closely follows Saint Paul’s view as expressed in his first epistle to the Corinthians: “Knowledge puffeth up; but charity edifieth.”

This essay is adapted from On Pedantry: A Cultural History of the Know-It-All (Princeton University Press, 2025).