observance of
Christmas as a Church festival in the centuries we are considering:
_this poetry is the poetry of monks, or of men imbued with the monastic
spirit_.

The two centuries following the institution of Christmas saw the break-up
of the Roman Empire in the west, and the incursions of barbarians
threatening the very existence of the Christian civilization that had
conquered classic paganism. It was by her army of monks that the Church
tamed and Christianized the barbarians, and both religion and culture
till the middle of the twelfth century were predominantly monastic. "In
writing of any eminently religious man of this period" [the eleventh
century], says Dean Church, "it must be taken almost as a matter of
course that he was a monk."{5} And a monastery was not the place for
human feeling about Christmas; the monk was--at any rate in ideal--cut
off from the world; not for him were the joys of parenthood or tender
feelings for a new-born child. To the monk the world was, at least in
theory, the vale of misery; birth and generation were, one may almost
say, tolerated as necessary evils among lay folk unable to rise to the
heights of abstinence and renunciation; one can hardly imagine a true
early Benedictine filled with "joy that a man is born into the world."
The Nativity was an infinitely important event, to be celebrated with a
chastened, unearthly joy, but not, as it became for the later Middle Ages
and the Renaissance, a matter upon which human affection might lavish
itself, which imagination might deck with vivid concrete detail. In the
later Christmas |35| the pagan and the Christian spirit, or delight in
earthly things and joy in the invisible, seem to meet and mingle; to the
true monk of the Dark and Early Middle Ages they were incompatible.

What of the people, the great world outside the monasteries? Can we
imagine that Christmas, on its Christian side, had a deep meaning for
them? For the first ten centuries, to quote Dean Church again,
Christianity "can hardly be said to have leavened society at all.... It
acted upon it doubtless with enormous power; but it was as an extraneous
and foreign agent, which destroys and shapes, but does not mingle or
renew.... Society was a long time unlearning heathenism; it has not done
so yet; but it had hardly begun, at any rate it was only just beginning,
to imagine the possibility of such a thing in the eleventh century."{6}

"The practical religion of the illitera