The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Long Middle
Robert of Tombelaine
died 1080Patristic
A Norman monk who wrote on the Song of Songs from a rock in the tide-flats, and got read for five centuries.
Pictured: the era he stood in — Wycliffe Giving 'The Poor Priests' His Translation — W. F. Yeames, public domain
Summary
- Lived died 1080.
- Stood in The Long Middle (AD 600–1500).
- Hangs on The Fathers.
- Tradition: Patristic / Western.
The life
Robert was born about 1010 in Normandy. He became a monk at Mont-Saint-Michel, the abbey built on the great rock in the bay where Normandy meets Brittany, and then withdrew to Tombelaine, the smaller, bleaker islet a mile or so north of it, cut off twice a day by one of the fastest tides in Europe. He lived there as a hermit, and it is the name he carries.
He was drawn into the reforming currents of his century. He knew Lanfranc, and he was involved in the reform movement associated with Pope Gregory VII. About 1063 he was made abbot of Saint-Vigor at Bayeux, a house founded by Bishop Odo, William the Conqueror's half-brother. He seems to have ended his life at Rome under Gregory VII's protection, dying about 1080.
His book is a commentary on the Song of Songs.
The Song had a settled medieval reading: the bride is the church, the bridegroom is Christ, and the love poetry of the Old Testament is the love story of redemption. Robert works that reading out at length and with tenderness, the beams of cedar are the preachers, the panelled ceilings are the faithful who shelter under them, the beloved's absence is the soul's dry season, the search through the streets at night is what prayer feels like when God seems gone.
He leaned on Gregory the Great, who had begun a commentary on the Song and left it unfinished. That connection made the fortune of Robert's book. Scribes bound the two together, Gregory's fragment followed by Robert's continuation, and copied them as a single work under Gregory's name. The combined Gregory-and-Robert commentary became one of the three most widely copied medieval expositions of the Song of Songs, alongside Bernard of Clairvaux's sermons and Honorius of Autun.
So for centuries readers were reading Robert of Tombelaine and thinking they were reading a pope who had died four hundred years earlier. His name was recovered only when scholars went back through the manuscripts.
He also wrote on other parts of Scripture, and a letter or two survives.
A hermit on a tidal rock in the eleventh century, writing about the love of Christ for his church, got read across Europe for five hundred years without most of his readers knowing who he was.
Sources: Robert of Tombelaine, Commentarium in Cantica canticorum (Migne, Patrologia Latina, vol. 79, printed among the works of Gregory the Great); Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages; Ann W. Astell, The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages; Histoire littéraire de la France, vol. VIII.
What was happening while he lived1 moments · AD 600–1500
- 1054East and West break apartOn July 16, papal legates lay a decree of excommunication on the altar of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople; the patriarch, Michael Cerularius, excommunicates them back. It formalized a split that had been widening for centuries over language, the *filioque* clause added to the Nicene Creed in the West, and how far Rome's authority reached.
In their own words
“Cyprus is an island in which more abundant vineyards grow than elsewhere. Therefore by Cyprus the universal Church is designated, which nourishes many vineyards, since divided into many churches, it produces the wine that gladdens the heart of man. Engaddi is interpreted as "fountain of …”
Commentary on the Song of Songs, Chapter 1 · on Song of Solomon 1:14
“My beloved is to me a cluster of henna blossoms in the vineyards of En-gedi.”
“When the Holy Spirit is given, the holy Church becomes a wall, because she who was previously timid, being instructed by the same almighty Spirit, is impenetrably strengthened to resist adversaries. This is shown by the same Peter, timid before a servant girl, soon firm …”
Commentary on the Song of Songs, Chapter 8 · on Song of Solomon 8:9
“If she is a wall, we will build a tower of silver upon her. If she is a door, we will enclose her with panels of cedar.”
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Robert of Tombelaine at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
A Norman abbot who wrote on the Song of Songs from a monastery in the tide-flats.
Hangs on The Fathers: The men who carried the faith out of the apostles' hands, and wrote down what they had received.
Standing beside himThe Long Middle · 51 on this stretch of wall
Asked why God became man, and answered it so well the question has never gone away since.
Wrote England's first history from inside a Northumbrian monastery and dated everything from the birth of Christ, which is why we still count years that way.
.jpg%3Fwidth%3D480&w=3840&q=75)
Preached with such fire that Europe followed him, and wrote 'Jesus, the very thought of Thee.'
.jpg%3Fwidth%3D480&w=3840&q=75)
Wrote the most careful theology of the Middle Ages, then saw something of God and called all of it straw.
Wrote Columba's life, and pushed through a law protecting women and children from war.
Charlemagne's teacher, who cleaned up the Bible's Latin text and rebuilt the schools of Europe.