Last Things

by Bynum, Caroline Walker; Freedman, Paul;

  If we consider this body of scholarship in its interconnectedness, it seems clear then, first, that the twelfth and thirteenth centuries do see basic shifts in eschatological assumptions—shifts that must be understood in historical context—but also that several sets of eschatological attitudes coexist and conflict throughout the western European Middle Ages. We may call these sets of attitudes the eschatology of resurrection, the eschatology of immortality, and the eschatology of apocalypse.

  In the 1940s, Oscar Cullman argued that Christian eschatology was based fundamentally in the Hebrew notion of embodied person, not in the Greek (or Platonic) identification of soul with self.26 Thus the early Christian idea of bodily resurrection, an element of the Christian creed from circa 200, was crucial to hopes of ultimate salvation and significance, whereas the notion that what survives is an immortal spirit, temporarily encased in flesh, is a later and only partially successful grafting from classical culture. Such an effort to sort out ideas according to intellectual precursors alone belongs to a particular stage of twentieth-century historiography in which debates about Christianity versus classical culture or Pauline versus patristic Christianity reflected in part debates between Protestant and Catholic understandings of the early church. Today we tend to locate ideas more historically and are inclined to regard the emphasis on bodily resurrection in the years around 200, as does Carole Straw in her essay, in the context of a need for retribution and triumph associated with the experience of persecution, or as other scholars have recently done, in Greco-Roman as well as Jewish death rites with their emphasis on reassembling bodies for peaceful and respectful burial.27 Similarly, we are inclined to situate the emergence of an emphasis on a separated soul immediately after death and on a place (or time or kind of experience) for that soul’s continuing development both, as Carole Straw and Peter Brown do, in changing circumstances and ideas of political and ecclesial authority and, as Manuele Gragnolati does, in changing sensibilities concerning the person and the significance of suffering. Nonetheless there does seem to be (as Cullman’s analysis makes clear) a disjunction and incompatibility throughout medieval texts between an eschatology of resurrection—a sense of last things that focuses significance in the moment at the end of time when the physical body is reconstituted and judged—and an eschatology of immortality—in which the experience of personal death is the moment of judgment, after which the good soul (and it is necessarily the soul that is in question, because the body is moldering in the grave) either gains glorification and beatific vision at once or moves into the experience of growth through suffering known as purgatory.

  The disjunction between immortality and resurrection does not, however, seem to encompass fully the variety of eschatological emphases between the second and the sixteenth centuries. Scholars today are inclined to pay greater attention than did those of mid-century to what we can call the eschatology of apocalypse—a stance that assumes the imminent arrival of the end of the world for all of humanity. Sharing with the eschatology of resurrection an emphasis on the end of time, a sense of the person as embodied, and a focus on humanity as collective, the eschatology of apocalypse shares with the eschatology of immortality a sense that what matters is the here and now, an end that looms as immediate or very soon. Apocalyptic eschatology contrasts, however, with both the eschatology of resurrection and that of immortality in implying a political payoff. It faces toward society and coerces the here and now, although it can be reformist as well as radical and does not necessarily, as scholars in the 1950s argued, recruit the disadvantaged or the discontented. As the papers of Backman, Hudson, Daniel, Smoller, and Papka make clear, the eschatology of apocalypse not only gives rise to predictions of the horrors or delights of imminent end, but also sometimes inflects and deepens literature, such as descriptions of plague or visions of heaven, hell, and resurrection, that seems originally to arise from traditions with a much less imminent sense of “last things.”

  The three eschatologies differ in what the person seems fundamentally to be and the extent to which his or her fate is individual or collective, in how and whether time seems to be marching, in where the end is located, in the extent to which “last things” provide a locus from which the here and now is reformed, rejected or embraced. Moreover, they are not fully compatible. Certain problems are obvious. If the moment of personal death determines whether one goes to heaven or hell, judgment at the end of time, although required by the Christian creed, may seem superfluous or supernumerary; furthermore, it is hard to see why the resurrection of the body adds anything, as Bernard of Clairvaux says it must, to a beatific vision already received by souls in heaven.28 If the separated soul works out the payment for sins in a personal between-time, how will this individual time-calculus square with the march of ages or days toward either a distant bodily resurrection or an imminent Antichrist and world conflagration? Won’t some souls in purgatory run out of time? If the signs or even the calendar point to an immediate end of the world for all people, why should the Christian quantify individual sins and their penalties or endow masses to be said for centuries rather than gather an army to re-take Jerusalem or execute Christ’s persecutors? Or, to take another example, if relics reside in altars awaiting resurrection, how can the saints simultaneously petition Christ in heaven? But if they do not so petition, how then can the faithful escape not only final condemnation but also decades or centuries of purgatorial fire?

  Theologians and preachers occasionally worried about some of these issues and incompatibilities. But for the most part eschatological thinking and behavior encompassed contradictions fruitfully, if not always easily. It would be quite wrong to see any text explored in this volume as an example of a single eschatology, just as it would be inaccurate to take the nuanced historical changes described by our authors as the replacement of one eschatology by another. Although each element changes meaning and significance over time, bodily resurrection, the experience of separated soul, and the looming of apocalypse are all present in some sense in every text discussed below. For example, Bernard of Clairvaux’s heaven, explored by Anna Harrison, might seem a fine-tuned case of an eschatology of immortality if the pressure of resurrection belief did not so deeply influence Bernard’s concept of person. The plague literature explored by Laura Smoller maps onto a late-medieval scientific curiosity about wonders an eschatology that is not only apocalyptic but also individualistic and materialist in ways that connect to concerns for immortality and resurrection.

  The contradictions and richness of the texts and experiences described in this volume should not disconcert us. As most recent scholarship underscores, religion is not so much doctrine as a way of life. Medieval eschatology was, like life, profoundly inconsistent. Perhaps eschatology is, in the western tradition, the most paradoxical aspect of religiosity. There are religious traditions in which self flows from a spirit world to which it almost effortlessly and seamlessly returns, traditions in which earthly existence is a moment in an eternal dreaming. In such a sensibility, neither individual nor collective death is exactly an end. In contrast, the western religious traditions—Islam, Judaism, and Christianity—are all brooded over by the sense of “last things.” A sense of the end, whether soon or distant, individual or collective, contradicts (indeed explodes) itself, for it looks to a moment that gives significance to the course of time by finally denying or erasing (ending) that to which it offers significance. If eschatology is then essentially paradoxical, we should not be surprised to find that the plethora of eschatological writings produced by the western European Middle Ages utilizes and deepens rather than denies or impoverishes its multifold and contradictory traditions.

  Because all three eschatologies are found in every era and indeed in every effort to explore and describe “last things,” we have not organized the essays presented here as different kinds of eschatology. Rather we have grouped them under three rubrics: “The Significance of Dying and the Afterlife,” “Apocalyptic Time,” and “The Eschatologic
al Imagination.”

  Part I focuses on changing concepts of the afterlife and hence of the space and time of personal, individual destiny. Carole Straw and Peter Brown provide complementary descriptions of the emergence of a sense of purgatory out of an earlier spirituality that focused on judgment and resurrection. Manuele Gragnolati describes fourteenth-century notions of heaven and hell, in which heaven is achieved via an experience of suffering that—while not purgatory—functions as such in the poetry studied. The death of the archbishop of Cologne discussed by Jacqueline Jung is not only an instance of personal sanctity via martyrdom parallel to the early eschatological understanding traced by Straw; it also, like the poetry Gragnolati studies, makes suffering the vehicle to the individual’s afterlife. Hence the disparate papers in Part I are all in a subtle sense about purgatory or purgation.

  Part II treats authors and texts that are apocalyptic in the sense of expecting an imminent end to the world, although Benjamin Hudson’s review of Gaelic literature also treats texts that focus on distant resurrection and both E. Randolph Daniel and Laura Smoller suggest that the authors they study are in no simple sense apocalyptic. The essays in Part III address several classic texts and objects that either directly confront or indirectly evoke “last things,” both apocalyptic and non-apocalyptic. Although they share definitions of eschatology with the earlier essays, these final papers focus less on what the texts tell us about last things—whether death or heaven or heaven on earth—than on how an awareness of end time inflects the ways people think about and depict self and community. Hence every essay in this collection in some sense reflects all three of the eschatological awarenesses of the European Middle Ages.

  The Themes of This Collection

  The four papers in Part I concern the transformation worked by death, a future event taking place in a more assuredly proximate time than the apocalypse. Its advent, even in the most placid life, is unmistakable. Apart from the disturbing and often terrifying anticipation, certain issues provoked by the Christian attitudes toward death are discussed in the four essays: the relation between the individual’s death and the ultimate disposition meted out by the Last Judgment; the condition of the soul after death in relation to bodily suffering in this world and the future resurrection of the flesh, and the significance of earthly pain and penance for the soul’s destiny in the next world. In all these matters, the personal drama of death is to be understood in relation to a progressive unfolding of collective history, divine order, and the eschatological climax that provides the ultimate disposition for individual soul and body.

  In the church of the martyrs described by Carole Straw, the winding up of this world and its tawdry affairs seemed near, and so the question of the soul’s sensations in the (short) span between personal death and collective resurrection did not directly arise. The expectation of physical torment as a climax to worldly existence corresponded with immediate entry into bliss in its aftermath. That torment was itself an individual glimpse of the end not only because of testing and purgation but also as prologue to an immediate heavenly existence. The earthly body’s sensations applied to the martyrs while the resurrected flesh and its sufferings were invoked to dramatize the punishment of the persecutors in the world to come.

  The stark extremes of sanctification and punishment in the early church changed first with the embrace by Rome and later with the waning of ancient Christianity. Peter Brown describes a world in which a large category of the partially bad or the worldly but well intentioned had to be dealt with. The existence of such a category and Augustine’s rejection of perfectionism meant that the expiation of inadequacy might push against the borders of the afterlife, an afterlife that was itself extended by the retreat of a certain, immediate judgment. The first glimmers of purgatory are visible in considering the disposition of these non valde mali, the imperfect but not reprobate, not because of their intrinsic deserts but because of a dialectic of divine mercy and a process of personal satisfaction of spiritual debts. Here again the evolving attitude toward the transformations wrought by death was affected by (and in turn influenced) eschatological assumptions. While the church of the martyrs had little interest in penance and telescoped purgation into the drama of martyrdom, the early medieval church focused more on the painfully slow improvement of the self. God as the righteous judge of the wicked or as the unaccountably merciful figure of the late and post-Roman world gave way to a more careful keeper of a penitential ledger as the apocalypse receded.

  The remaining two essays deal with the high Middle Ages and the sufferings of the body before and after death. As in Carole Straw’s discussion of martyrdom, so too in Jacqueline Jung’s essay, it is atrocious physical suffering before a violent death (here of the archbishop of Cologne) that determines the fate of the soul. In the arguments put forward by Caesarius of Heisterbach, however, martyrdom is not the climax of a pious life but a holy death made necessary by a worldly life. The archbishop, an example of the non valde mali but as a powerful rather than a mediocre man, was sanctified by reason of his horrible death, a brief but intense purgation reminiscent of early Christian martyrdom but under the sign of penance rather than triumphant witness—an example of sweeping divine mercy.

  Physical suffering was also important to Bonvesin de la Riva, as Manuele Gragnolati argues, but in a form somewhat different from that posited by Caesarius of Heisterbach. Pain in this life is an inevitable accompaniment to the corrupt body whose weakness and rottenness are unmistakable indications of the approach of death. For Bonvesin such weakness is overcome in a very physical heaven. But suffering is a means of salvation itself if we join with the graphically depicted agony of Christ on the cross. In a sense then, an affective imitatio Christi is a kind of purgatory. But to Bonvesin the arrival of the end is immediate. As with the early church (but for different reasons), entry into the afterlife brings with it the full impact of divine judgment on the individual.

  The articles in Part II concern the best-known aspect of medieval eschatology, the arrival of an apocalyptic end of the world and of time. The end time might be anticipated as a series of disasters, as was commonly the case in the Irish writings studied by Benjamin Hudson. So grim was the prospect of the final judgment that among the special favors for Ireland that St. Patrick was thought to have procured from God was a promise to destroy it seven years before the ultimate ordeal to be suffered by the rest of the world. As Laura Smoller points out, those undergoing the terrifying experience of the Black Death were moved, not surprisingly, to regard the pestilence as more than a natural disaster—part of a movement of catastrophes from East to West indicating that the end time was at hand.

  On the other hand, millennial expectation could challenge the exclusive emphasis on divine wrath. An era of exile might also promise a new Exodus from human failure and corruption, according to E. Randolph Daniel’s analysis of the prophetic theories of Joachim of Fiore. Clifford Backman shows how Arnau de Vilanova, the renowned physician and apocalyptic theorizer of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, combined fears of humanity’s inadequacy before the impending onslaught of Antichrist with an essentially optimistic exhortation to radical reform and expectation of a time of peace after a sharp period of testing.

  In all these instances apocalyptic chronologies were set with a certain precision: the immediate present of the Black Death of 1348–49, Irish fears centered around the arrival of the Feast of John the Baptist in 1096, Joachim’s expectations for 1200, and the predicted arrival of Antichrist according to Arnau de Vilanova in about 1365. Beyond precise issues of timing, however, the authors of the articles in Part II consider the interaction of chronology and collective apocalypse with the eschatological view of human life. Hudson notes the Gaelic proclivity for journeys and visions of the next world and a sense of different fates, for the Irish collectively as in St. Patrick’s privilege already alluded to, or the special status of St. Ailbe and his followers awaiting the final judgment in penitential rest. Occasiona
lly Ireland itself was thought of as the promised land, thus asserting a form of realized eschatology, the active fulfillment of antecedents to the end of time. In the case of Joachim of Fiore there is a similar sense of realized anticipation, that the era of exile is reaching its climax but the leader of the exodus to salvation, St. Bernard, has already appeared.

  Clifford Backman and Laura Smoller explore the confluence of materialistic and miraculous explanations for eschatological phenomena. Backman explains how a doctor and scientist, generally enthusiastic about naturalistic and materialist explanations, nonetheless avoids discussion of bodily reassemblage at the end of time, stressing instead the joy of heaven. Arnau’s precision was focused on determining the when rather than the what of apocalypse. Smoller demonstrates how the plague epidemic was explained by reference to natural causes understood in terms of apocalyptic prophetic traditions. As Smoller points out, place, time, and event all possessed eschatological significance so that the report of the doctors of Paris on the causes of the plague is a series of naturalistic explanations to be read within an eschatological context and set of assumptions. Such a mixture modified and softened stark predictions of the timing of the apocalypse. It was imminent as revealed by measurable signs and prophecy, but its exact timing remained ambiguous and dependent on the unfolding of nature according to divine plan.