A THOUSAND YEARS LATER
ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD:
RECONTEXTUALIZING ZEN KOANS
by Hotetsu
[Case]
Gateless Gate #22:
Ananda asked Kashyapa in all earnestness, “The world-Honored One transmitted the brocade robe to you. What else did he transmit to you?”
Kashyapa called, “Ananda!”
Ananda replied, “Yes, Master.”
Kashyapa said, “Knock down the flagpole at the gate.”
[History]
Clothilde, Basina, and the Revolt at the Abbey
Clothilde, daughter of Charibert by an unnamed liaison, was likely born in the early 550s when her grandfather Clothar was still alive and her father was still a prince. She would have been a teenager when Charibert died in 567. Since Charibert had been excommunicated for polygamy and incest (two of his wives were sisters), when he died, his daughters and wives were seen as tainted by scandal. The Church forbade them to marry (or remarry), and required them to enter convents or live in seclusion. Within a year, Clothilde was sent to Poitiers, to the Abbey of Sainte-Croix.
Basina, youngest of five children of Chilperic and his first wife, Audovera, was probably born around 565. When Basina was perhaps two or three years old, Chilperic set aside Audovera and forced her into a convent to clear the way for his marriage to Galswintha of the Visigoths in 568 – whom, within a year, Chilperic murdered to make Fredegund queen.
Audovera's three sons met violent ends, the last one assassinated at Fredegund's direction in 580 to remove any challenge to Fredegund's own son's succession. That same year, Audovera herself was murdered on Fredegund's orders, and Audovera's two daughters were forced into convents to remove any threat that they might marry noblemen who could claim the throne or challenge Fredegund's son's legitimacy. The elder daughter went to the same convent to which her mother had been consigned, and Basina, then about fifteen, was sent to the Abbey of Sainte-Croix, arriving there some twelve years after her cousin Clothilde.
Radegund died in 587, and Agnes shortly after, about 588 – by which time Clothilde had been in the convent some 20 years and Basina, eight. When Sister Leubovera was appointed the new abbess, apparently with royal approval rather than by election, she took the reins of an institution that had grown to over 200 women — some devout, some resentfully exiled from the privilege to which they had been accustomed.
Clothilde and Basina objected to Leubovera’s abbacy. Perhaps they thought one of them should have been made abbess, or, at least, that someone of higher birth than Leubovera should have authority, or they disliked the new abbess’s policies, or they had more personal reasons for detesting Leubovera – or all of these. In any case, they began to question Leubovera’s authority, accusing her of favoritism, greed, and misuse of the abbey’s revenues.
In the spring of 589, Leubovera attempted to enforce stricter enclosure, forbidding the women from receiving male visitors or leaving the grounds without permission. Basina and Clothilde, claiming spiritual and familial rights, organized resistance. They now accused her of excessive rigor and immorality: allowing strange men to enter the abbey and fornicate with nuns, and herself keeping a castrated man in the convent. Some pregnant nuns and a local eunuch were supposedly produced in evidence, though the eunuch denied he’d ever met the abbess and the “pregnant nuns” may have been outsiders coerced into posing as nuns, or simply a rumor circulated to discredit Leubovera and her supporters.
The nuns barricaded the cloister, armed themselves with kitchen implements and stones, and drove out the abbess’s supporters. Local clergy and royal officials were scandalized. Maroveus, Bishop of Poitiers, attempted mediation but was refused entry. The rebels sent messengers directly to King Guntram, a brother of Charibert and Chilperic, thus an uncle of both Clothilde and Basina, and the king whose realm included Poitiers. They complained that Leubovera had violated both monastic rule and royal privilege, and appealed for royal protection and judgment. Clothilde announced, “I am going to my royal kin so they will know of our indignity, for here we are abased. I am treated not as the daughter of a king but as the spawn of filthy slave girls.” They described conditions of “starvation, nakedness, and above all of beating.”
When Macco, Guntram’s Count of Poitiers, intervened, his troops were pelted with debris from the convent walls. Eventually, Macco forcibly imposed order at the abbey, and the rebels fled or were expelled from Sainte-Croix, and took refuge at the church of St. Hilary, just over a kilometer from the abbey, outside the Poitiers city walls. There, the princesses and 40 or so rebellious sisters who joined them, were able to assemble a small militia of mercenaries. Gregory described these men as “murderers, sorcerers, adulterers, run¬away slaves and men guilty of all other crimes.” The mercenaries assailed and repelled the party sent to formally excommunicate the women for having left the abbey. Then the rebels and their mercenaries took possession of the abbey’s dependent estates, cut off its revenues, and claimed the authority to administer its property. They abducted Leubovera, with Basina herself guarding the abbess to prevent escape.
Bishop Maroveus roused townfolk against the rebels by imposing a moratorium on baptisms until the rebellion was ended. In Gregory’s account, Clothilde threatened to kill Leubovera if anyone tried to rescue her. Then Basina and Clothilde fell to quarrelling, and Basina reconciled with Leubovera and switched sides. Clothilde, her mercenary army, and a few sisters loyal to her held out until Count Macco’s men defeated them.
Childebert II (son and successor of Sigebert) and his uncle, Guntram, agreed to each send their bishops to deal with the incident in accordance with Church law. Gregory, Bishop of Tours; Ebregisel, Bishop of Cologne; and Gundegisel, Bishop of Bordeaux, joined Maroveus in Poitiers. The bishops reinstated the abbess and declared her innocent of everything of which the rebels had accused her.
Clothilde and Basina were both excommunicated, though the excommunication was shortly absolved, at the request of King Childebert II, and the two reconciled to the Church. The cousins were probably placed in other convents or lived under ecclesiastical supervision elsewhere, and thus lived out their lives. The nuns who had joined with Clothilde and Basina in rebellion were, reported Gregory, “brought back to obedience” – probably meaning they were assigned a penance and re-admitted to Sainte-Croix.
[Fiction]
Closing the Rule
After Radegund's death, Clothilde and Basina each made a claim to Radegund’s private cell. When they came to the Abbess about this, Agnes noticed the anger rising in her. She took a deep breath before answering the cousins. “Dear Radegund of beloved memory never – never – sought or accepted a privilege that would set her apart from or above the lowest-born sister among us. From the depth of her devotion to God, she used her cell to practice austerities without disturbing others. I believe you have heard of the extent of her austerities. Is that what you wish to undertake?” After that, Agnes heard no more from the royal cousins about the matter.
Agnes was aware that in her later years Radegund had tempered the extremes of her asceticism, finding a gentler “middle path” – but Agnes was also aware that Clothilde and Basina would have heard the stories from Radegund’s early austerities and wouldn’t know they had grown less harsh. In any case, even Radegund’s middle way didn’t allow for the sort of indulgence these princesses wanted.
Radegunds’s thin bedding, a carved reading lectern, and a few personal possessions were left undisturbed in her cell, which was now a shrine to the abbey’s beloved founder. Twice a day – for an hour immediately after Prime and a half-hour immediately before compline -- Agnes, Madeleine, Gertrude, Marcia, Berthilda, and Casyapina continued to gather in this shrine to continue the practice they had learned. Among themselves, they spoke of their Violet Sisterhood, for the flowers with which Radegund had signified their entrustment.
During the time after the silence, when Radegund had shared her reflections, the sisters rotated responsibility for posing a question, on which each of them then shared thoughts, usually raising further questions, regularly drawing each other into deepening mystery.
When, barely a year after Radegund’s demise, Sister Agnes followed her into death, the Violet Sisterhood was down to five. With the abbey’s founder and the only abbess it had ever had now gone, the abbey faced a crisis of leadership and authority – and soon, open rebellion. One morning, as Clothilda and Basina’s public complaints were escalating toward revolt, the Violet Sisters made their way to Radegund’s room for their morning gathering to seek a moment of peace in silence and each other’s company. Someone had brought in a bound codex of Caesarius’s
Rule for Virgins and left it open on Radegund’s lectern – perhaps they’d been looking for what Caesarius said to do in event of rebellion.
As the nuns sat stone still in silence, their minds wandered. Radegund had taught that this was inevitable. “The practice,” she would say, “is not to stop the mind from doing what the mind does, but to notice it doing it – and when you do, gently bring the attention back to listening.” On this morning, with the anxiety of schism in the abbey, their minds wandered rather more than usual. Madeleine pushed aside thoughts about that – and what popped up instead was her memory of the day Radegund had handed her a violet. Madeleine well remembered that Casyapina had smiled first, and that Casyapina had received the first blossom.
Berthilda, taking her turn as the timekeeper, rang Radegund’s handbell to end the silence. The sisters cut short their discussion time that day, their thoughts preoccupied by what was transpiring in the abbey. Casyapina and Madeleine were the last to leave.
Their eyes met.
Madeleine spoke: “That day Radegund gave us the violets. Did she – or had she – given you anything else?”
Casyapina, no longer a novice, had taken her final vows, and, before that, had completed the formal theology curriculum as Madeleine’s student. The girl who couldn’t stop praying when she entered the abbey five years before was no longer that wordless postulant. She was aware of the gulf between herself and Madeleine’s learning – and of Madeleine’s need, for all her accomplishment, for an apt response to her question. What teaching, what reminder, at that moment might a junior sister offer to her senior — the theology master who had taught her so much? She simply called.
“Madeleine!”
And Madeleine replied, “Yes, sister.”
Casyapina looked down at the book, Caesarius’
Rule, on the lectern. “Close that book, would you?”
The next morning, Madeleine was awake before the Matins bells. Lying on her pallet of rushes and straw, she thought about that moment with Casyapina. She remembered the sound of the young nun’s voice calling her name – and the way her “yes, sister” answer had seemed to come out of her mouth before any decision, before any will to reply. Any minute, she thought, the bell would ring, and, in a like manner, without conscious deciding, the nuns would rise and make their way to the chapel without a word. She thought about the ways she was called: called by a sister, by bells tolling the liturgical hours, called by God to a life of devotion, called to explore the reasonings of theologians, to engage with ideas as a way of building both human community and divine communion. She thought also of the calls she answered by saying, “no,” such as Clothilde’s and Basina’s call for rebellion. Was there some calling that Clothilde and Basina were answering? And were they answering it in the same sort of graceful, unencumbered way that she had answered “yes, sister” to Casyapina? Madeleine supposed that every action by every person was, in its way, a response to some sort of calling – but some responses can seem, well, ungraceful. Unskillful. Encumbered, somehow. Clothilde and Basina’s way of responding to whatever they thought was calling them lacked the smooth and flowing quality exemplified by a person being called by name and the person answering, “yes?” The rebels' behavior felt encumbered. By what? She thought of Radegund’s word: willfulness. We’re all called, and we all answer in our way – but if we get all caught up in the idea that it’s our will, our desires, that determine either the call or our answer, then we’re encumbering ourselves. Madeleine thought of Gregory of Nyssa who wrote that spiritual progress depends on letting go of our concepts and attachments, on
kenosis, self-emptying. The simple, uncalculating way we answer when our name is called is emptied of self.
Kenosis is not hard – except that we so readily fill back up with self again. The ongoing challenge is always to keep ourselves as emptied as we can, trusting to a nature (within us? around us?) that knows better how to guide us than our concepts, attachments, and will can.
What did Casyapina say next? Oh, yes, she said, “close the book.” Perfect. Caesarius’s
Rule was an important guide, but the even more important guide was the emptied self – inevitably informed by our learning and study, then letting go of any reliance on conscious concepts.
In the darkness of the night, Madeleine realized with a start that it was now well past the time when the Matins bell should have rung. The silence was heavy. The rebellion was now disrupting the abbey’s liturgical hours.
