[In the following essay, Beale focuses on An Epistle of Mixed Life and explores its message regarding merging a contemplative life with the an active life.]

Examining texts in the light of their traditions and historical backgrounds is an inherently risky business, because traditions and historical backgrounds are partly defined by the texts themselves. Thus texts that do not conform to the historian's conception of “tradition” are valuable in a special way, because they provide the opportunity for testing and reordering the larger historical conceptions which inform individual interpretation. Such a text is Walter Hilton's Middle English treatise, An Epistle of Mixed Life It invites reexamination of a medieval tradition of writings on the topic of “active and contemplative life,” where something of a reordering may be called for in our thinking. While the present study partly seeks to illuminate a single text, it seeks also to make a significant comment on the larger tradition.¹

Like many of the texts which belong to the Middle English devotional tradition, the Mixed Life is addressed to a single reader: in this distinctive case, “to a worldli lord to teche him hou he sculde haue him in his state in ordeynd loue to god and to his euencristene.”² Also, like such better known texts as the Scale of Perfection and the Cloud of Unknowing, the Mixed Life eventually found a wider audience which reached well into the sixteenth century. The treatise survives in at least nine fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manuscripts; and there were six printed editions, the last in 1517.³ Although its original audience-of-one was undoubtedly, as the introduction announces, a gentleman of “high estate,” the scope of the book was easily widened by redactors, who simply lopped off the original preamble and addressed it to “brothers and sisters.”⁴ Hilton might easily have objected to this kind of tampering with a treatise like the Scale of Perfection; with the Mixed Life, which is not specialized or esoteric in the least, the tampering was proper and inevitable.

As its manuscript and printing history attests, the Mixed Life was not widely regarded as eccentric or freethinking in its own historical setting; but to the modern reader, and even to the modern medievalist, it can be interestingly unsettling. One apparent anomaly, from the modern reader's point of view, should really be no snag at all to anyone familiar with the major medieval statements, but it comes up often enough to deserve some attention here. This is the conspicuous absence of an argumentative edge, of a sense that one is dealing with conflicting values and life-styles, or with a long tradition of debate. To the extent that we are perplexed or thwarted by the expectation of this atmosphere, we are the sons of Renaissance writers who, conditioned by their classical sources to think of the “debate” between active life and contemplative life, imposed this scheme on the statements of medieval figures. A perfectly delightful example of Renaissance mis-interpretation appears in Isaac Walton's Compleat Angler: “And for that I shall tell you,” he says,

that in ancient times a debate hath risen (and it remains yet unresolved) whether the happiness of man in this world doth consist more in contemplation or in action. Concerning which some have endeavoured to maintain their opinion of the first. … And they say, That God enjoys himself onely by a contemplation of his own Infinitenesse, Eternity, Power and Goodness, and the like. …

And upon this ground many Cloysteral men of great learning and devotion prefer Contemplation before Action. And many of the Fathers seem to approve this opinion, as may appear in their Commentaries upon the words of our Saviour to Martha. …

Concerning which two opinions I shall forbear to add a third, by declaring my own, and rest my self contented in telling you … that both these meet together, and do most properly belong to the most honest, ingenuous, quiet, and harmless art of Angling.⁵

What Walton does not realize, or at least chooses to ignore, is that the “fathers” that he refers to did not use the antitheses “active and contemplative” or “active life and contemplative life” in this way. In fact, nothing more readily characterizes medieval discussions than this very absence of controversy. In the first place, the issue was fairly well settled: “Maria elegit optimam partem,” said Jesus to Martha in what early became a locus classicus.⁶ Perhaps somewhat perplexing to a man like Walton would be reflection on the fact that such seminal documents as Gregory's Pastoral Rule and the Homilies on Ezeckiel are concerned with making a case for an active life. Even though contemplation is obviously better than action, there are overriding circumstances which make the active life better for some individuals.

THE MEDIEVAL CONTEXT

More importantly, the circumstance has not been sufficiently appreciated that the various medieval appropriations of these antitheses, the various attempts to sort out the lives, hierarchize them, and develop them into mystical paradigms, represent complementary, not competing solutions. They were not the result of intellectual debate over the relative merits of action and contemplation, as Walton supposed. Rather, they were largely the result of a basic tendency to formalize and categorize every aspect of experience, an activity that was carried on in a variety of local contexts; and moreover, the product of devotion and meditation on a topic which had deep alignments with Christian theology and mysticism, and which was in itself the product of a rich history of Biblical exegesis. It is no accident that most medieval discussions of the topic of active and contemplative life are to be found in Biblical commentaries, in devotional treatises, and in manuals for religious, types which are oftentimes combined, as in Bernard's famous Sermons on the Canticles.

It is in this light, I think, that one must place some of the apparent novelties of Hilton's treatise, for although the treatise is innovative in a narrow sense, the fact of the innovation itself—as well as the basic content of the treatise—is thoroughly in line with the tradition in which Hilton writes. Briefly, here are some of the problems: The medieval topic of active and contemplative life has often been taken by historians to be a set of teachings relating to mystical theology—a subset, in fact, outlining the contemplative's state in comparison to other men, as well as the path of his spiritual ascent.⁷ Yet the Mixed Life contains little that can with any precision be called mystical. It develops no system of spiritual ascesis, and one discovers none of the hierarchical patterns of ascent—from active to contemplative—common to mystical tracts like Hilton's Scale of Perfection. Another discrepancy is occasioned by the common connection of the topic with a strict social and ecclesiastical model: active life for uneducated laymen, contemplative life for monks, hermits, anchoresses, etc., and some version of mixed life for bishops and prelates—these in ascending hierarchy; yet Hilton's treatise bypasses the hierarchical arrangements found elsewhere, in the Summa Theologiae for instance, by insisting that each external state of life calls forth its own appropriate excellence in regard to the Christian law of charity—the precise referent of his phrase, “in ordeyned loue to god and to his euencristene.” Also, of course, there is the singular prima facie circumstance that the treatise is addressed to a layman; as later adaptations of the work suggest, this eventually democratized a set of formulations traditionally reserved for Churchmen of a high stamp. And this points to the most conspicuous innovation of the treatise, Hilton's use and application of the concept, “medled lyf.” At least one commentator has singled out this fact as the basis for praising the work as a bold divergence from the medieval model, leading into the world of Sir Thomas More and the Renaissance;⁸ while another, T. P. Dunning, in a study of Piers Plowman, has dismissed it as an eccentricity which introduces distinctions and applications that are superfluous and misleading.⁹

The ideas behind Hilton's notion of mixed life, if not the application he makes of it, seem traditional enough. They come mainly from Augustine and Gregory, especially the latter's Pastoral Rule. But curiously enough, the formulation “mixed life,” as a separate state to be compared and contrasted with active life and contemplative life, was not a common one. In fact, nowhere does one encounter such Latin terms as “vita media” or “vita mixta,” except in the fifteenth century manuscripts of Hilton, where they are surely translations of the English “medled lyf.”

PATRISTIC BACKGROUND

In the City of God Augustine does at one point speak of a third kind of life, which is a kind of mixture, “ex utroque compositus,” as he puts it; but the context of the passage makes it fairly clear that he is talking of a pagan formulation—in particular that of the Roman Stoic Varro—because he brings it up to point out how futile are the pre-Christian debates about active and contemplative life.¹⁰ At any rate in his later very copious digressions on the subject, in the Tractates on John and elsewhere, the formulation does not reappear. Nor does the notion of mixed life as a state requiring a separate designation appear in Gregory, although the idea is obviously implicit, as it is in some of the statements of Augustine, and in these cases the idea applies specifically to the state of the bishop. “In contemplation he transcends heaven,” Gregory says of the bishop,

and yet in his anxious care he deserts not the couch of the carnal; because, being joined at once to the highest and to the lowest by the bond of charity, though in himself mightily caught up in the power of the spirit into the heights above, yet among others in his loving kindness he is content to become weak. … Hence Jacob, with the Lord looking down from above … saw angels ascending and descending, to signify that true preachers not only aspire in contemplation to the holy head of the Church … but also descend in commiseration downward to His members. Hence Moses goes frequently in and out of the tabernacle, and he who is wrapped into contemplation within is busied outside with the affairs of those who are subject to infirmity.¹¹

Gregory was careful to point out that the active life of a bishop involved a higher kind of activity than that pursued by those who live the active life alone; and the notion of an active life which was in a narrow sense higher than the contemplative became something of a commonplace where the matter of ecclesiastical hierarchy was at stake. On the other hand, one finds that in works which are addressed specifically to contemplatives, this pattern is ignored and a hierarchy leading from active to contemplative is dominant. This circumstance helps to explain an important feature of the medieval discussion—namely, that there are different adaptions for different occasions and audiences—and it also provides a context for understanding the often-quoted pronouncement of Thomas Aquinas:

… the contemplative life is, absolutely speaking, more perfect than the active life which is taken up with bodily actions; but the active life according to which a man, by preaching and teaching, gives to others the fruits of his contemplation is more perfect than the life by which a man contemplates alone, because such a life presupposes an abundance of contemplation. And therefore, Christ chose such a life.¹²

The immediate context of Aquinas' statement involves the question of the relative merits of the “lives” narrowly conceived as external states. But the terms “active life” and “contemplative life” are usually used in far richer, sometimes multiple senses; and sometimes they do not refer to external states at all, as when Richard Rolle speaks of occasionally being snatched up, during meditation on the Psalms, into “contemplatif lyf.”¹³

What can we say of the “mixed life”? Even in the Summa the predominant notion is of a higher active life, and Aquinas studiously avoids a third classification. In another passage, it is interesting to note, he rejects the Aristotelian vita voluptuosa as a classification on the grounds that such a life does not properly pertain to humans but to beasts; and also, he adds, because the symbols of Rachel and Leah—a commonplace since Augustine—would not match if there were more than two lives.¹⁴ Middle English writers seem to take similar care. The author of the Cloud of Unknowing makes a point of insisting that there are not three lives but two;¹⁵ Rolle, for whom the “lives” are practically equivalent to emotional states—mystical communion or the lack of it—remarks at one point that the idea of uniting the two lives would seem to him an impossible feat, except perhaps for Christ himself.¹⁶ Hilton's own Scale of Perfection does not mention it. And Nicholas Love, the fifteenth-century translator of the Meditations on the Life of Christ, mentions the mixed life, but seems somewhat perplexed by it. If you want to know more about this life, he says, go look in Walter Hilton's book.

USE OF TERM

In the thoroughgoingly mystical context of the Scale of Perfection, the notion of mixed life would be useless clutter, and this is no doubt why Hilton does not bother with it. What is more surprising, in view of the obvious possibilities, and what is more difficult to explain, is that the “mixed life” did not in medieval tradition become a paradigm for the Christian life in general, with Christ as the archetypal exemplar. Indeed, the symbolism of Christ as either exemplifying or embodying both lives is a common one; but in this symbolism, generally, the two sides of Christ (his head and his feet as Hilton, following Gregory, works it out) represent something broader than the lives narrowly conceived as external states—the body of Christ as the whole Christian community, for instance. Or when they are so conceived, the office of prelate, and not just any Christian is being described.

There are a number of practical reasons why the boundaries of the discussion were not generalized to all Christians, among them the fact that from the earliest times the topic of active and contemplative life had been carried over from classical writers into the discussions of Churchmen and contemplatives, specifically, removing from it the broader social and political preoccupations of men like Cicero and Seneca. And the topic remained, by and large, the property of Churchmen and contemplatives. Surely the terms themselves, and the famous Biblical pairs—Martha and Mary, Rachel and Leah, and so on—were widely known; but discussions outside the context of mystical and devotional treatises and Biblical exegesis, are rare and perfunctory. In adapting the Meditations on the Life of Christ for a popular audience, Nicholas Love retains only a much curtailed remnant of the long discussion inspired by Christ's visit to Mary and Martha in the original, “for it semyth as inpertynent in grete party to many comyn persones and symple soules.”¹⁷

There are deeper explanations, however, for the uncompelling nature of the idea of “mixed life,” and in understanding them, perhaps paradoxically, we begin to understand the basis for Hilton's own use of the idea. These reasons have to do with the multiplicity of contexts in which the classical topos of active and contemplative life was taken over in the Christian world; with the new intellectual and spiritual alignments into which terms “active life” and “contemplative life” were absorbed; and with a wealth of Biblical symbolism with which the discussion inevitably became identified. In this connection, Aquinas' apparently flippant remark that a third vita would destroy the symmetry of Rachel and Leah is quite revealing: for in reality the topic of active and contemplative life was not a set of designations for ecclesiastical hierarchy, although it could be used that way; nor a series of designations for progressive steps toward spiritual perfection, although it was very often used that way; and certainly not a package of alternative life-styles, as it was in the treatises of Cicero and Seneca which Augsutine knew so well. It was primarily a set of open-ended antitheses, accompanied by a vast Biblical symbolism, including in its semantic well not only these specific designations but the whole structure of the Christian community, the human personality, history, and the order of the world. The very terms themselves provide the incentive not for debate but for meditation, a productive symbolism for the duality that underlies existence itself. A full history of the topic would reveal the wide diversity as well as the essentially “meditative” character of medieval statements on active and contemplative life. In lieu of the needed fullness, the present study will seek to provide a classification of things, and a set of explanations that lead directly to Hilton and the “medled lyf.”

Of paramount concern to the historian should be the reminder that medieval discussions on this topic participate in a larger history, one that begins in the Greece of Socrates and persists into modernity. A study of this history reveals that the terms active life and contemplative life are never so much fixed concepts as reference points of social and intellectual conscious and consciousness. As such they are susceptible to very narrow definition—as life-styles or social states, or types of character; but they are also susceptible to much more philosophical and cosmic orientation. This points to what I believe is an important historical pattern: the oscillation from orientations that are social to orientations that are cosmic. Plato and Aristotle are the exemplars of cosmic orientation. The theoretical life (bios theoretikos) and the practical are discussed within a context where the distinction itself is a mirror of the mind, the polis, and beyond that the character of existence in general. The ultimate issue is not a question of life-style or occupation but of harmony between the individual and the state and the cosmos. Augustine is also an exemplar of cosmic orientation—and, of course, the abiding authority for medieval authors. But Augustine's immediate secular sources were not Plato and Aristotle, but Latin writers of the Roman world, particularly Cicero and Seneca, in whom we find most conspicuously the tension between Stoic allegiance to statecraft and the Epicurean allegiance to the “retired life,” and a consequent de-philosophizing to the point of social orientation. The conflict between the lives has become largely a conflict of life-styles and values.

LAW OF CHARITY

Augustine takes up the debate where he finds it, but characteristically, he refuses to play a game whose rules are written by shortsighted pagans. In a passage from the City of God, the style of which reveals Augustine's exasperation with pagan benightedness, he tells us that the reason they could never make up their minds about the active and contemplative life was that they were unable to put the issue into its proper context. In doing so, he frames a mode of discussion that we can look upon as characteristically medieval:

But those who have supposed that the ultimate good and evil are to be found in the present life, placing the ultimate good either in the body or in the soul or in both, or, to speak more explicitly, either in pleasure or in virtue or in both, in repose or in virtue or in both, in pleasure combined with repose or virtue or in both, in the primary wants of nature or in virtue or in both, all these persons have sought, with a surprising vanity to be happy in this life and to get happiness by their own efforts.¹⁸

(emphases mine)

An older discussion continues here, but it has been placed within a new, transcendental paradigm of existence—the City of God. A little later on, Augustine makes the point specific:

It matters not to the heavenly city whether one who follows the faith that leads to God follows it in one dress or manner of life or in another, so long as these are not contrary to the divine precepts. … Of those three kinds of life … the inactive, the active and the composite, although any one might lead his life in any of them with faith unimpaired and attain to the everlasting rewards, nevertheless there is importance in what he possesses through his love of truth and in what he pays out because of the claim of Christian love. … Wherefore it is love of truth (caritas veritatis) that prompts the search for holy leisure, while it is the compulsion of love (necessitas caritatis) that makes men undertake a righteous activity in affairs.¹⁹

There is more here than a practical conciliation of values and life-styles, although the passage has been thus characterized. Augustine has effectively subordinated the conflicting claims of action and contemplation, as well as the various ideals of conduct, to the Christian law of charity. There is more than merely the adaptation of an ancient topic to a new teaching; he has altered the status of the topic itself. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Tractates on the Gospel of John, where the orientation is fully cosmic:

There are two states of life, therefore, preached and commended to herself from heaven, that are known to the Church, whereof the one is in faith, the other in sight (in specie); the one in the temporal sojourn in a foreign land, the other in the eternity of the heavenly abode … one in active work, the other in the reward of contemplation. … This one was signified by the Apostle Peter, that other by John. The whole of the one is passed here to the end of this world, and there finds its termination; the other is deferred for its completion till after the end of the world, but has no end in the world to come.²⁰

Clearly, in this passage, the conflict of values has given over to an integrated symbolism; debate has passed over into meditation.

It is precisely this larger framework which makes possible a variety of formulations worked out in different contexts, consisting of patterns and symbolisms of a potentially conflicting type. Thus in works that are distinctly mystical, one finds various paradigms leading from active life, through a series of middle states, and finally to the pinnacle of contemplative; in works like the Summa, on the other hand, or Gregory's Pastoral Rule the hierarchy culminates in the external state of the Bishop. Each type is attended by a treasure of Biblical symbolism. This inevitable parade of symbols not only highlights the devotional nature of these discussions but it also helps to account for the diversity of formulations. The basic mode of exposition of the relationship between the two lives is that of Scriptural interpretation. As the topic came to be more and more thoroughly identified with its symbolic superstructures, there were bound to emerge a rather large number of differences, simply as a result of overlapping symbolic systems. These differences were no more bothersome than the many other differences caused by the accretion of interpretations of Scripture in general. As a matter of fact, one might take a great deal of delight in the very multiplicity.

The connection with Biblical interpretation is a potent one and it provides our best clue to what Hilton is doing with the Mixed Life. Mary and Martha signify the contemplative and the active lives, to be sure, but they can do so at various levels. At one level, they are literal social states; at another, active and contemplative mental faculties; at another, two states in a process toward contemplation; at another, the present life and the afterlife; at another, the world of history and the world of eternity. Augustine's solution to the problem of exegesis is quite well known: any interpretation of Scripture which conforms to the law of charity is acceptable and useful for teachers. His solution to the problem of the lives is quite similar: whichever of those modes of living or conduct is actually chosen is less important, ultimately, than the requirement that every life be ordered in charity. This is precisely Hilton's text, from the Canticle: Ordinavit in me caritatem. (He has ordered charity in me.)²¹

The symbols of the dualism of the lives are always attended by the symbols of their ultimate unity: the Church, which contains both the lives; Christ, who is both and lived both; and the Law of Charity, which commands both. Hilton uses all of these symbols, but especially the last. More important than one's external state is the internal ordering; obedience to both sides of the law of charity. Bishops attain this in one way; contemplatives another; secular lords in another. It is on these terms that the “medled lyf” is recommended to the secular lord of our treatise. In hitting upon this formulation Hilton realizes that he is stretching a definition—the equivocation is from “spiritual responsibility” to any kind of worldly responsibility²²—and he realizes that this is not a life that, in Aquinas' formulation, “presupposes the abundance of contemplation.” But Hilton certainly has no consciousness of arguing a different position, or of urging a novel concept—only of adapting a devotional topic to the needs at hand.

Notes

1. No full history of these writings has appeared. A compilation of some important quotations may be found in Dom Cuthbert Butler, Western Mysticism: The Teaching of Augustine, Gregory, and Bernard on Contemplation and the Contemplative Life, 3rd ed. (London 1967). A competent but sketchy survey of documents from Plato through Augustine and Gregory is provided by Jacob Zeitlin in his preface to the English translation of Petrarch's Life of Solitude (Urbana 1924). Also of considerable interest is the first part of Dietmar Mieth, Die Einheit von Activa Vita und Vita Contemplativa in den deutschen Predigten und Traktaten Meister Eckharts und bei Johannes Tauler. Studien zur Geschichte der Kath. Moraltheologie, 15 (Regensburg 1969).

2. Yorkshire Writers: Richard Rolle of Hampole, An English Father of the Church and His Followers, ed. Carl Horstmann, (London 1895) 1. 264. Quotations are from the edition of the Vernon Ms.

3. The Minor Work of Walter Hilton, ed. Dorothy Jones (London 1929) pp. xvi-xxxii.

4. As in the fifteenth-century Lambeth ms. edited by Jones, Minor Works.

5. The Compleat Angler; or, the Contemplative Mans Recreation, ed. James Thompson (New York 1962) pp. 40-41.

6. Luke x.41-42.

7. This is the position taken by Butler, Western Mysticism.

8. Frank M. Towne, Active and Contemplative Life: Studies in Patterns of Living in Medieval England, Diss. UCLA 1949, pp. 177-178.

9. “The Structure of the B-Text of Piers Plowman” RES 7 (1956) 235.

10. City of God, XIX, 3: “Ex tribus porro illis vitae generibus, otioso, actuoso et quod ex utroque compositum est, hoc tertium sibi placere adseverant.” The City of God Against the Pagans, tr. William Chase Green (Cambridge, Mass. and London 1960) 3.120. Further quotations are from this edition.

11. Liber Regulae Pastorum, II, 5: Coelum contemplatione transcendit, nec tamen stratum carnalium sollicitudine deserit, quia compagine charitatis summis simul, et infirmis junctus, et in semetipso virtute spiritus ad alta valenter rapitur, et pietate in aliis aequanimiter infirmatur. … Hinc Jacob Domino de super innitente, et uncto deorsum lapide, ascendentes ac descendentes angelos vidit; quia scilicet praedicatores recti non solum sursum sanctum caput Ecclesia … sed deorsum quoque ad membra illius miserando descendunt. Hinc Moyses crebro tabernaculum intrat et exit; et qui intus in contemplationem rapitur, foris infirmantium negotiis urgetur.” PL 77. 33-34. Tr. James Barmby, The Book of the Pastoral Rule, and Selected Epistles of Gregory the Great in A Select Library of Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers, ed. by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (New York 1898) 12.

12. Summa Theologiae, 3a.40, I: “… vita contemplativa simpliciter est melior quam activa, quae occupatur circa corporales actus; sed vita activa, secundum quam aliquis praedicando et docendo contemplata aliis tradit, est perfectior quam vita quae solum est contemplativa, quia talis vita praesupponit abundantiam contemplationis. Et ideo Christus talem vitam elegit.” St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Latin Text with English Translation, ed. by the Blackfriars (New York 1963) 53. 54-56.

13. The English Psalter, in The English Writings of Richard Rolle ed. Hope Emily Allen (Oxford 1931) p. 4.

14. Summa Theologiae, 2a 2ae. 179.2: “Sed contra est quod istae duae vitae significantur per duas uxores Jacob, activa quidem per Liam, contemplativa vero per Rachelem; et per duas mulieres quae Dominum hospitio receperunt, contemplativa quidem per Mariam, activa vero per Martham, ut Gregorius dicit in VI Moral. Non autem esset haec congrua significatio si essent plures quam duae vitae. Ergo sufficienter dividitur vita per activam et contemplativam.” (Blackfriars, ed., 46. 6-8.)

15. The Cloud of Unknowing and the Book of Privy Counseling, ed. Phyllis Hodgeson EETSOS 218 (1944) p. 52.

16. The Fire of Love, tr. Clifton Wolters (Harmondsworth 1972), p. 112: “I do not know if anybody has ever done this: it seems to me impossible to do both at once. We must not reckon Christ in this respect as an ordinary man, nor his blessed Mother as an ordinary woman.”

17. Nicholas Love, Speculum Vite Cristi (Westminster: William Caxton, 1490) IV, 33.

18. City of God, XIX, 4: “Illi autem, qui in ista vita fines bonorum et malorum esse putaverunt, sive in corpore sive in animo sive in utroque ponentes summum bonum, atque, ut id explicatius eloquar, sive in voluptate sive in virtute sive in utraque, sive in quiete sive in virtute sive in utraque, sive in voluptate simul et quiete sive in virtute sive in utrisque, sive in primis naturae sive in virtute sive in utrisque, hic beati esse et a se ipsis beatificari mira vanitate voluerunt” (p. 122).

19. City of God, XIX, 19: “Nihil sane ad istam pertinet civitatem quo habitu vel more vivendi, si non est contra divina praecepta. … Ex tribus vero illis vitae generibus, otioso, actuoso et ex utroque composito, quamvis salva fide quisque possit in quolibet eorum vitam ducere et ad sempiterna praemia pervenire, interest tamen quid amore teneat veritatis, quid officio caritatis inpendat. … Quam ob rem otium sanctum quaerit caritas veritatis; negotium iustum suscipit necessitas caritatis” (pp. 200-203).

20. Tractates, CXXIV, 5: “Duas itaque vitas sibi divinitus praedicatas et commendatas novit Ecclesia, quarum est una in fide, altera in specie; una in tempore peregrinationis, altera in aeternitate mansionis; una in labore, altera in requie; una in via, altera in patria; una in opere actionis, altera in mercede contemplationis; una declinat a malo et facit bonum, altera nullum habet a quo declinet malum, et magnum habet quo fruatur bonum. … Ista significata est per apostolum Petrum, illa per Joannem. Tota hic agitur ista usque in hujus saeculi finem, et illic invenit finem; differtur illa complenda post hujus saeculi finem, sed in futuro saeculo non habet finem.” In Evangelium Joannis Tractatus CXXIV: PL 35. 1974. Translated in The Works of Aurelius Augustine, A New Translation, ed. by Marcus Dods (Edinburgh 1878) 12.

21. Yorkshire Writers, 2. 267.

22. Yorkshire Writers, 2. 268: “Also hit longeth generali to sum temporal men the whuche han souereynte with muche hauyng of worldly godes, and also han as hit were a lordshipe ouer othur men to gouerne & susteyne hem, as a fader hath ouer his children, a Maister ouer his seruantes, and a lord ouer his tenauntes; the whuche man also han receyued of the gift of vr lord grace of deuocion, & in parti sauour of gostli ocupacion.”