The Saracens of the West: Honoré Bovet and the Decadence of a Schismatic Church

Honoré Bovet’s L’Apparicion Maistre Jehan de Meun presents a heated discussion between a prior, the ghost of Jean de Meun, and a group of outcasts, including a physician, a Jew, a Saracen, and a Jacobin.  The text, written in 1398, occurs during the Western Schism and looks toward the prophecies related to the apocalyptic year 1400, when the “Church is blackened” and the “Saracens are victorious.”  Through this conversation, each of the characters explains why he was excluded from the Christian community, and each defends himself by accusing the Christians of comparable crimes; each, that is, except the Saracen.  Unlike the other three marginalized figures, the Saracen never admits to any crime and never apologizes.  Instead, he articulates a lengthy description of the monstrous Christians with whom he has come into contact.

Following the organizational patterns of the preceding engagements with the physician and with the Jew, the Saracen’s reprimand against the social decadence of the fourteenth century must act as a parallel to the reasons why the Christians cast them out of France. Because these moral flaws relate to common social practices, like feasting and dressing fashionably, rather than explicit religious discrepancies, the Saracen, I believe, passes a fascinating judgment that both implicitly and damningly reveals to the Christians the implications of these apparently shallow judgments.  For centuries, Christians linked the luxury of the East with Ezekiel 16, where God reprimands Jerusalem for sharing in the decadence of Sodom. 

According to the Jacobin who provides a gloss on the Saracen’s diatribe, Islam is not ontologically distinct from Christianity but arose as a result of the Great (East-West) Schism; Saracens, then, join the ranks of earlier schismatic races, including that of the Sodomites.  Although some Christians might be quacks like the physician, or usurers like the Jew, most are not; however, any Christian that enjoys dining or wears the latest fashion clearly reveals his relationship to the Saracens (and, thus, the Sodomites). The Saracen indirectly reveals how the late fourteenth century social practices of feasting and high fashion, Saracen-like practices, result from the contemporary Western Schism, and the people of the divided church are, in fact, Saracens themselves.  The victory of the Saracens, then, does not result from an external enemy, but develops from the interior degradation of the Western Church.