Last Things
THE MIDDLE AGES SERIES
Ruth Mazo Karras, General Editor
Edward Peters, Founding Editor
A complete list of books in the series
is available from the publisher.
Last Things
Death and the Apocalypse
in the Middle Ages
Edited by
Caroline Walker Bynum
and Paul Freedman
PENN
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia
Copyright © 2000 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Last things : death and the Apocalypse in the Middle Ages / edited by Caroline Walker Bynum and Paul Freedman.
p. cm. — (The Middle Ages series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8122-3512-6 (cloth : alk. paper). —
ISBN 0-8122-1702-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Eschatology—History of doctrines—Middle Ages, 600–1500.
I. Bynum, Caroline Walker. II. Freedman, Paul H., 1949–
III. Series.
BT819.5.L37 1999
236’.09’02—dc21
99-34223
CIP
Frontispiece: Jan van Eyck, The Last Judgment.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fletcher Fund, 1933 (33.92b).
Contents
Introduction
Caroline Walker Bynum and Paul Freedman
Part I: The Significance of Dying and the Afterlife
Settling Scores: Eschatology in the Church of the Martyrs
Carole Straw
The Decline of the Empire of God: Amnesty, Penance, and the Afterlife from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages
Peter Brown
From Jericho to Jerusalem: The Violent Transformation of Archbishop Engelbert of Cologne
Jacqueline E. Jung
From Decay to Splendor: Body and Pain in Bonvesin da la Riva’s Book of the Three Scriptures
Manuele Gragnolati
Part II: Apocalyptic Time
Time Is Short: The Eschatology of the Early Gaelic Church
Benjamin Hudson
Exodus and Exile: Joachim of Fiore’s Apocalyptic Scenario
E. Randolph Daniel
Arnau de Vilanova and the Body at the End of the World
Clifford R. Backman
Of Earthquakes, Hail, Frogs, and Geography: Plague and the Investigation of the Apocalypse in the Later Middle Ages
Laura A. Smoller
Part III: The Eschatological Imagination
Community Among the Saintly Dead: Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermons for the Feast of All Saints
Anna Harrison
Heaven in View: The Place of the Elect in an Illuminated Book of Hours
Harvey Stahl
The Limits of Apocalypse: Eschatology, Epistemology, and Textuality in the Commedia and Piers Plowman
Claudia Rattazzi Papka
Notes
List of Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Caroline Walker Bynum and Paul Freedman
Eschatology comes from the Greek eschatos—furthest or last—hence our title, Last Things, the term medieval thinkers themselves used for the variety of topics covered in this book.1 Recent scholarship has tended to treat separately concerns that both medieval intellectuals and ordinary people would have seen as closely linked: death, the afterlife, the end of time (whether terrestrial or beyond earth), and theological anthropology or the theory of the person. In bringing within one set of covers essays on all four topics, it is our contention that none can be understood without the others. The interest in medieval death since the foundational work of Philippe Aries in the 1960s and 1970s, the older debates over the conflict between resurrection and immortality generated by Oscar Cullman in the 1940s, the flurry of attention to the geography of the afterlife stimulated by Jacques Le Goff’s The Birth of Purgatory in 1981, the outpouring of research on millennialism and apocalypse produced in reaction to Norman Cohn’s Pursuit of the Millennium (1957), and recent study of the understanding of the human person stimulated in part by German scholars but carried into more popular discourse by historians such as Simon Tugwell and Caroline Bynum—this large body of literature has even more far-reaching implications when taken together than when considered as separate areas of research.2 The moment of death, the places of the afterlife to which souls depart (heaven, hell, and purgatory), the final judgment or millennial age that may either be or presage the end of time, and the person, reunited at judgment or in the afterlife, are all “last things.” By considering them together, we hope to add to discussions of how eschatological attitudes changed over time, to bring into sharper focus the divergent eschatological assumptions of the Middle Ages and the conflicts or incompatibilities among them, and to raise more explicitly than is sometimes done the question of how eschatological understandings hovered over human experience, inflecting the ways people spoke about values and hopes.
Recent Scholarship
There is no shortage of books and articles on aspects of eschatology. In popular as well as academic circles the medieval period is associated with a passionate atmosphere of fear yet also expectation, a preoccupation with the time of Christ’s Second Coming and a restless poring over of natural and political disasters and upheavals for signs of the imminent denouement of sacred history. Current anticipation of the arrival of the new millennium, historiographic debates over how the year 1000 was perceived, and the attention given to medieval social movements with their often millenarian tinge—all these have encouraged study and reflection on the eschatological imagination of the Middle Ages. Perhaps more enduring and disturbing than the effects of the approach of the year 2000 are current obsessions with illness and dying that have prompted study of medieval notions of personal death, of a paradise beyond this life, and of the inspirational and protective presence of angelic beings.
Given the proliferation of works on medieval apocalyptic subjects and on medieval ideas of death, some justification is no doubt required for this collection and its intended place in the context of recent works. Eschatology understood as the significance of imminent future history (that is, as apocalyptic) has been a main subject of historical investigations since Marjorie Reeves’s pioneering 1969 volume, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages. Much attention has been given to the course and influence of specific movements, especially in relation to calculations of the end and their resonance in popular demands for reform, revolution, or renewal. Such studies include influential accounts of individual prophets and prophecies, notably Bernard McGinn’s The Calabrian Abbot and Robert Lerner’s The Powers of Prophecy,3 and a number of works on the Antichrist, among them Richard Emmerson’s Antichrist in the Middle Ages.4 Byzantine apocalyptic sentiment has been dealt with masterfully by Paul Alexander’s The Byzantine Apocalyptic Tradition.5 A comprehensive encyclopedia on the entire range of apocalyptic subjects has recently appeared.6
In addition to accounts of major symbols and prophets, there has been notable progress in perceiving the importance of anti-apocalyptic sentiment in the era of the barbarian kingdoms and the Carolingian Empire, centuries that used to be regarded as devoid of millenarian expectation. Richard Landes, in an article in the collection The Use and Abuse of Eschatology in the Middle Ages, has argu
ed that what seem to be jejune temporal calculations of patristic theologians and monastic annalists in fact involved a continuing discourse against an identifiable moment of apocalypse that had the effect of post-poning (and thereby ultimately inflating) expectation by recalculating the age of the world and the arrival of the millennial “seventh day.”7 Derk Visser has asserted the enduring importance of a lesser-known figure of the ninth century, Berengaudus of Ferrières, whose optimistic millenarianism reappears as late as in the iconography of the Van Eyck Ghent Altarpiece.8 Although the apocalyptic formulations of this era were largely discredited and their influence has been more difficult to discern than that of such major high medieval prophets as Joachim or even eccentric later writers such as Arnau de Vilanova, their formulae and expectations would endure and be reworked well beyond the limits of the Middle Ages.
Recent scholarly interest in the apocalypse has centered on timing, not only of the future but also in relation to the past ages of history, and on the identity of prophesied figures such as the Antichrist, the Whore of Babylon, or the Angelic Pope. The various eschatological movements have also been considered as phenomena in their own right. Indeed, since Norman Cohn’s Pursuit of the Millennium, scholars have argued about how far—or whether—such movements had their origins and expectations in demands for radical social change. The millennium could be seen not only as the unfolding end of history but also as the arrival of justice for the oppressed and inarticulate. Some recent studies have related demands for the humbling of the mighty and the exaltation of the meek to the Peace Movements and the arrival of the year 1000,9 the heretics burned at Orléans and Arras in the eleventh century, and to the programs of the Spiritual Franciscans, Hussites, and peasant insurrections of the late Middle Ages.10 The virulent antisemitism of the late Middle Ages has also been linked to apocalyptic speculation about the enclosed unclean peoples of Gog and Magog.11
This emphasis on social history has diminished the tendency to regard medieval apocalyptic movements as purely religious or psychological expressions; hence they become something other than instances of the mystical response or spasmodic irrationality so often attributed to the period. In taking this approach historians have attended to the content of apocalyptic anticipation, implicitly dividing the subject into optimistic accounts of a future utopia and fearful pessimism in anticipation of the plagues and other upheavals foretold by the Book of Revelation.12 Pessimistic tendencies have been related to the psychological needs and religious anxieties of the Middle Ages while the optimistic versions have been the object of a more sociological analysis.
Although the topic of apocalypticism was previously sometimes equated with the history of specific prophetic movements, literary historians have long treated it as a discernible element in medieval thought generally.13 Following in this tradition, Richard Emmerson and Ronald Herzman suggest that medieval literary works are pervaded by apocalyptic thinking. Katherine Kerby-Fulton has written on the optimistic apocalyptic background to Piers Plowman.14 Rather than seeing apocalyptic sentiment as the expression of unbearable tensions within society or doctrine, medievalists are now more inclined to find it mingled with this-worldly concerns, a lens through which experience and change were viewed, not simply a breaking apart of the established order. After all, as Guy Lobrichon has pointed out, there are almost placidly orthodox ways of approaching the apocalypse.15 Orthodox interpretations are not merely attempts to put off or obfuscate chiliastic events but also descriptions of how time and individual experience are permeated with the eternal destiny of humanity.
Along with work devoted to the apocalypse per se, there has recently been an outpouring of scholarly literature on two other aspects of eschatology: the fate of individuals at the moment of what Philippe Aries called “personal death” and the place, or other world, to which their souls depart after such individual judgment. A number of books on dying, death, and the dead in the Middle Ages have emphasized the ways an increasing focus on an individual’s own death as the moment of personal accounting inflected much of life and contributed to what the French historian Jean Delumeau has characterized as a Western “guilt culture,” so dominated by fear of damnation that much of life became a series of ritual preparations for dying. The increasing prominence of deathbed demons and of hell in art (our frontispiece provides an example) has been widely analyzed both as an expression of religious anxiety and as a mechanism of social control.16 From historians such as Frederick Paxton who have emphasized the importance of community in early medieval death rituals to recent scholarly literature on such subjects as tomb sculpture and the dance of Death that emphasizes the individualism of late medieval responses, recent work in art history, archaeology, literature, and history has treated the eschatological significance of death as “last thing.”17
Similarly there has been great attention in the past decades to the places of the afterlife and the means of access to them. Aron Gurevich and Claude Carozzi have explored voyages to the other world; Alison Morgan, Ernst Benz, and Peter Dinzelbacher, among others, have studied the visions of heaven and hell that figure so prominently in late medieval collections of revelations.18 As even the popular press has noted, medieval ideas of heaven, hell, and purgatory have recently received much scholarly attention. McDannell and Lang, among others, have studied the medieval image of heaven. Alan Bernstein’s The Formation of Hell is devoted to the gradual theological emergence of hell and the elaboration of its geography.19 In his path-breaking book The Birth of Purgatory, Jacques Le Goff took the study of the third eschatological place beyond questions concerning its doctrinal origin and justification to examine its effect on how this world was regarded and how the drive toward accumulation of wealth could be reconciled with the possibility of salvation.20 Barbara Newman has recently taken another step by interpreting purgatory less as a place than as a pool of suffering and underlining the role of women in its development.21
The Three Eschatologies
Medieval discussions of “last things” sometimes referred primarily to events (such as the 1000-year reign of the saints, the advent of Antichrist, or the resurrection and Last Judgment) that might come to all humanity in time or at the end of time. In the light of such a telos, human society was on pilgrimage, in transit (what Frank Kermode calls the mid-dest), confidently expectant or cowering in fear. Eschatological discussions sometimes, however, had in mind predominantly “last things” for each individual at his or her own moment of death—not only the places to which a soul might go, but also the accounting, the call to reckoning, signified by the end. Hence conceptions of “last things” tended to oscillate along several spectra: from collective to individual, from temporal to beyond time or atemporal, from a stress on spirit to a sense of embodied or reembodied self.
Many combinations of emphases were possible. Ends could be within time or just beyond. Hope for a millennial arrival within time could be a radical, even revolutionary critique of existing conditions or a support for existing power or for reform already afoot;22 it could usher in a golden age on earth or herald the immediate end of the world. Or the end for all could be the Last Judgment that ended time itself, consigning all mortals to heavenly bliss or perpetual damnation.
The end could also be individual, a person’s own “hour of death.” This personal end could be the moment of immediate decision for the separated soul (condemnation or redemption) or the advent of a period of waiting until judgment came for the reconstituted person at the end or beyond the end of time. Or personal death, although decisive, could nonetheless usher in a period of further transformation or purging (often in a third place, purgatory), which in some sense continued the changeability of life into the hitherto supposedly fixed (after)life beyond time. Given this variety of emphases and possible combinations, we may well ask whether we can find any broad patterns of change in eschatological thinking or behavior over the course of the Middle Ages. To answer this question, it may help to put side by side the various areas of recent schol
arship mentioned above.
Work on the topics of death, the afterlife, apocalyptic, and theological anthropology has been concerned—as good historical scholarship always is—with change. Study of medieval attitudes toward death and death rituals has tended to agree in essence if not always in detail with Philippe Ariès’s sense of a shift in the central Middle Ages from “tamed death”—a death expected and prepared for, experienced in community—to a “personal death,” an understanding of the moment of death as a decisive accounting for an individual self.23 Study of the afterlife has seen a parallel shift, in the twelfth century, from a twofold eschatological landscape of heaven and hell to an at least partially three-tiered afterlife, including the in-between space and time of purgatory, to which most Christian souls go after “personal death” for a propitiating and cleansing that may (or may not, depending on the prayer-work of those on earth) continue until a far-distant Last Judgment. Work on concepts of the human person has detected in the thirteenth century a shift from emphasis on resurrection of the literal, material body at the end of time to stress on the experience of the separated soul after death, although this scholarship has pointed out that the separated soul was at the same time increasingly imaged as bodily (somatomorphic), and that ordinary piety came to be characterized by both a sense of the significance of physical death and an emphasis on the spiritual value of somatic phenomena, especially suffering.
Partly coinciding with and partly departing from this picture, scholarship on apocalypticism and millennialism (those subjects of eschatology that see the collective end as imminent or ushering in a 1000-year reign of the saints) has tended to see the periods of the early church and of the later Middle Ages as physical and material in their eschatologies, characterized by proliferating visions of a final conflagration of the world but also the advent of a perfect earthly society of justice, plenty, and peace. In the 1970s, scholars viewed the period between Augustine’s rejection of apocalyptic thinking in the late fourth century and the reemergence of apocalyptic scenarios in the late twelfth century as a period of “realized eschatology,” in which Christ’s resurrection or Second Coming was already located in the heart of every devout Christian.24 Recent work has often seen traces of otherwise effaced popular apocalyptic fervor in the anti-apocalyptic writings of clerics and has emphasized (as does Claudia Papka in our volume in discussing Piers Plowman) the way the sense of an ending hovers over all spiritual writing in the Middle Ages.25
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