What lay at the end of it all, besides the immutable, reformed, and impassible body?191 While Hebraic tradition excluded the direct sight of God, Christians were more willing to imagine the face of Christ, if not the Father. Visions tended to be vague: dazzling figures were presumably those of the Lord, although they were not always identified as such. Different was Perpetua, influenced by The Shepherd of Hermas. An elderly shepherd offered Perpetua milk. In the same passion, Saturus saw walls of light, a garden and angels, while his aged man had a youthful face.192 Quartillosa’s young man of “remarkable stature” gave everyone generous cups of milk.193 While the giving of milk probably echoes baptismal rituals and obviously the image of Christ as good shepherd, nevertheless, the maternal overtones of such nurturing should not be ignored.
In a universe of exact measures, the images of Christ as comforter were balanced by those of the Lord as exactor. As one faced passion, courage could be strengthened by remembering that God was also a harsh judge and disciplinarian. Perpetua saw the Lord not only as a good shepherd but as an athletic trainer with a disciplinary rod.194 James echoes Perpetua’s vision, seeing a brilliant giant in an athletic tunic.195 The Lord was presumably the handsome judge in the shining high tribunal seen by Marian, a role which, like that of the trainer, suggests the demanding standards of ascesis.196
Glimpses of heaven itself were seldom recorded in detail, with the exception of Perpetua’s, which is assumed to reflect Montanist influences. Such scant information teased the audience, but imaginations sometimes could compensate. In early martyrs’ passions, it was sufficient to establish that right order would be restored—good rewarded and evil punished. What mattered was the vindication of the corporate Christian community and its beliefs. Indeed, to be too explicit could undermine the trust and expectation that kept the community together. Victor’s vision both reveals and conceals truth, a balance that nourishes faith and acknowledges its need. We are moving toward a world in which written records and established authorities would define truths: the very recording of martyrs’ passions would be part of the process of authentication.
Now this was the Lord from heaven, and Victor asked him where heaven was.
“It is beyond the world,” said the child.
“Show it to me,” said Victor.
He said to Victor, “Then where would be your faith?”197
Faith was the end, the telos, of the martyrs’ witness. They died to prove the faith, and their deaths disclosed knowledge of the spectacular transformation awaiting believers. For early Christians, martyrdom was an apocalypse of varied aspect, for that terrifying moment revealed many beautiful truths: the indisputable credibility of Christian doctrine, the hidden bones of the martyrs’ invincible courage, the secrets of angelic life to be shared with the elect. Christians lived in a world of contrasts and reciprocities, seeking always the balance, clarity, and resolution that defined a just universe. They could welcome the agon, the gruesome and pitiless ordeal, for it would earn a rich reward: a discernment of mysteries; revelations that could only console believers and augment the faith. The sweet truth was earned only through bitter trial.
This rigorous mentality of the church of the martyrs is central not only to understanding this age, but also to the future doctrine of the Church. The most ambitious and radical practices of self-sacrifice would continue to be valued as the most authentic form of Christianity. Historically, the perfectionists would always be deemed to be closer to God and therefore deserving of higher status in the institutional Church and (we might assume) in heaven as well. Those who sought accommodation with the world would be lesser citizens in the kingdom of God, fellow travelers whose allegiance could be easily impeached. This lesson the monks of the desert demonstrated pointedly after the Constantinian revolution, and the lesson was never forgotten.
The eschatology of the church of the martyrs also had a lasting impact. In emphasizing the antithesis of carnal and spiritual, the damned and the elect, writers shaped a particular view of life after death. The resurrection, while it is by definition an affirmation of the flesh, was so only dialectically: through the sufferings of the flesh, martyrs attained glory, just as Christ had been transfigured through suffering to come into his maiestas (cf. John 9: 18–36). The dualism of spirit and flesh remains. The joys of heaven as imagined by those in the church of the martyrs (and indeed later) were particularly those of the spirit. Those of the flesh were (and are still) deemed inappropriate. The Christian heaven is not the Moslem heaven of lush gardens, brocaded couches, and nubile virgins with retiring glances.198 Quite the opposite. Impassability was God’s gift to the glorified body, and the body was to enjoy both freedom from the acute sufferings of martyrdom and liberation from the passions and needs of everyday life, which might also be sources of pleasure. For Christians, the flesh could be celebrated only when it ceased to be the flesh they knew.
Eastern and Western traditions would deal differently with this legacy. The Eastern church would come to celebrate divinization as a fundamental doctrine, translating the rigorous demands of the martyrs into a program of divinization through progressive stages of asceticism. Having run the race, the heroic ascetics like abba Pambo and Paul the Hermit could await their crowns. The West, on the other hand, would embark on a different course with Augustine, who would be less optimistic about humanity’s spiritual progress, much less its heroism, and more convinced of the severity of God’s scrutiny. But Augustine would offer consolations for the fragile and ever-imperfect soul. The remedies of penitence and faith in the infinity of divine mercy could ease the terror of those facing the iudex tremendus. Augustine’s cry from the Confessions (10.35.57), “My one hope is your exceedingly great mercy,” would do much to console Christians who could only listen to the heroic feats of martyrs but never repeat them.
A universe polarized between heaven and hell, the saved and the damned, is taken for granted. Isn’t this what eschatology means? As historians, we should be wary of the obvious. Origen’s vision of the end with the rehabilitation of the devil and the restoration of all creation to prelapsarian goodness offered a startling alternative. Yet Origen’s doctrine would be declared heretical. The dialectical tension between spirit and flesh, good and evil, God and the devil proved to be an unassailable foundation of Christian thought. Redemption of humanity, with its sorrows of the flesh, could only be achieved through transformation. The heavenly body shone with a vitality whose brilliance reflected the aching burden of passion and pain the earthly body had once borne.
The Decline of the Empire of God
Amnesty, Penance, and the Afterlife from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages
Peter Brown
In the First Decade of the sixth century, Jacob, future bishop of Batnae in the region of Sarug, south of Edessa, described in a memre, a poetic homily, the manner in which the average parishioner might listen to a sermon:
When the preacher speaks of matters that concern perfection, it leaves him cold; when he tells stories of those who have stood out for their zeal for righteousness, his mind begins to wander. If a sermon starts off on the subject of continence, his head begins to nod; if it goes on to speak of sanctity, he falls asleep. But if the preacher speaks about the forgiveness of sins, then your humble Christian wakes up. This is talk about his own condition; he knows it from the tone. His heart rejoices; he opens his mouth; he waves his hands; he heaps praise on the sermon: for this is on a theme that concerns him.1
The Christian churches of late antiquity were full of such persons. Writing in the 420s against the moral perfectionism of the Pelagians, Augustine insisted that the peccata levia, the lighter, barely conscious sins of daily life that affected every Christian should not be held to exclude them from the hope of salvation. He wrote to none other than the patriarch Cyril of Alexandria that he had been accused by Pelagians of denying the existence of hellfire. He answered that not every sin led to damnation: “this error must by all means be avoided by which all sinners, if here be
low they have not lived a life which is entirely without sin, are thought to go to the punishment of eternal fire.”2 Many good Christians sinned through human ignorance and frailty. There would be room, eventually, in heaven for those “who indulge their sexual appetites although within the decorous bonds of matrimony, and not only for the sake of children, but even because they enjoy it. Who put up with insults with less than complete patience . . . Who may even burn, at times, to take revenge . . . Who hold on to what they possess. Who give alms, but not very generously. Who do not grab other people’s property, but who do defend their own—although they do it in the bishop’s court and not before a secular judge.”3 Such small sins could be atoned for, without recourse to dramatic public penance, by regular, unhistrionic practices—by the daily recitation of the “Forgive us our trespasses” of the Lord’s Prayer and by the giving of alms to the poor.4
Though reassuringly normal to modern, post-Augustinian eyes, such persons posed an acute problem to the late antique Christian imagination once they died. Augustine considered that their peccata levia were caused by a tenacious, subliminal love of “the world” and by habitual, unthinking over-enjoyment of its licit goods.5 Sins such as those were by definition pervasive and elusive. It was unlikely that they would all have been fully atoned for by the sinner in his or her own lifetime, even by the daily practices that Augustine recommended. Christian souls were faced with unfinished business in the next world.
Thus when, around 420, Augustine came to write an Enchiridion, a Manual of the Christian Faith, for Laurentius, a layman, he offered a definition of the category of the faithful for whom the traditional prayers offered by the faithful on behalf of the souls of the departed could be considered effective. Prayers were not needed for the valde boni—for such persons they were, rather, “thanksgivings.” They were of no help to the valde mali. But they were effective as “propitiations” for a broad category, which Augustine defined by means of a significantly open-ended non valde, a “not very”: the non valde mali, the “not very bad.”6 In writing in this way, Augustine faced a pastoral and imaginative situation whose consequences have attracted the attention of many of the best modern scholars. In his lucid book, In hora mortis: l’évolution de la pastorale chrétienne de la mort aux ive et ve siècles, Eric Rebillard has drawn attention to the transformation of traditional Christian attitudes to sin implied in the “redefinition of penance” in the Christian churches in the West in the course of the fifth century. As Rebillard makes plain, Augustine was not alone in the tendency to “dramatize the temptations of every moment” and to insist on a reshaping of the Christian attitude to sin: “it was no longer a matter of sins [that is, of crimina, clearly defined “mortal” sins, such as adultery, murder and perjury] for which the believer must obtain pardon, but, rather, of the confession that one is nothing but a sinner before God.”7 Inevitably, such an attitude gave to the peccata levia, the day-to-day sins of the non valde mali, a consistency, a pastoral importance, even a diagnostic status (as perpetual symptoms of the weakness and ignorance into which humankind had fallen since the sin of Adam) that they had lacked at a time when “sins” had meant, above all, crimina—the sins of the hardened, known sinner that the Church had the unique, indeed miraculous, power to absolve. The Christian church had shocked pagans by the apparent ease with which serious sins seemed to be forgiven in those who joined it. The Christian emphasis on forgiveness seemed to undermine the disciplina, the high moral tone, of Roman society.8 Now the image of the church as a sanctuary in which sinners became saints overnight, through conversion, repentance, and forgiveness, was replaced by a community where all members remained sinners. All Christians were committed to daily preparation for the hora mortis, for the moment of their death, through daily recognition of their sinfulness.9
But, as Augustine’s Enchiridion made plain, the story could not be said to end at the moment of death. The prayers of the faithful for the departed were taken to imply that the partially unatoned souls of the non valde mali faced further eventualities. Augustine remained characteristically economical in his description of those eventualities. It was enough for him to stress that prayers on behalf of the departed were effective in some way: they obtained “complete remission or, at least, damnation itself becomes [because of them] less intolerable.”10 The Christian imagination went further. The imaginative representations of the fate of the soul as it entered the other world varied greatly from time to time and from region to region. Such representations differed markedly in the degree of risk to which the soul was thought to be exposed. Upper-class Christian epitaphs in Rome, for instance, hinted that all but the most fortunate (that is, of course, the deceased whose virtues were celebrated on such an epitaph) might have to wait somewhat tremulously before being ushered into the sweet light of the presence of Christ, much as one would wait before being introduced into the intimate presence of the emperor.11 Monks in Syria and Egypt, by contrast, thought in more dramatic terms. On its upward journey to heaven, the departed soul was jostled by ranks of demons, who sought to claim the soul for themselves on the strength of the unatoned sins that each soul still carried with it. Such a “journey of the soul” was thought of as the last stage in the drama of the monk’s perpetual battle with sin, now rendered utterly palpable in a world whose terrors were no longer mercifully veiled by the flesh.12 Even Saint Martin was believed, by those around him, to have been confronted on his deathbed by the Devil. He addressed the Devil, significantly, as cruenta bestia, as a “bloodthirsty beast.”
The Devil was almost a personification of Death, the last enemy to be overcome in the long, living martyrdom of Martin’s life. But the Devil also came as a creditor, entitled to claim his dues, if he could find any in Martin.13 Looking back on the account at the end of the sixth century, Gregory of Tours stressed that aspect of Martin’s deathbed. If even the departing soul of Martin was forced to halt for a moment on its way to heaven to give account of itself to the Devil, then the average Christian had good reason to be anxious: “What, therefore, will happen to us sinners, if this wicked faction (pars iniqua) wished to have so holy a bishop?”14 A little later, in the seventh century, common anxieties about the departure of the soul were taken up and transformed into a series of dramatic narratives. The souls of a privileged few had set out for the other world. At the moment of their apparent death in the course of acute illness, their souls had been taken from their bodies, shown significant sections of the other world, and then returned to life, to recount their experiences for the benefit of the living.15
Faced with so many vivid narratives, we should be careful not to endow any one of them with universal validity for all Christians of the age. They were fluctuating and incomplete representations, such as are best described in the words of Claude Lévi-Strauss as the “fabulation of a reality unknown in itself.”16 They were pieced together from many sources to impose imaginative form on a problem that was almost too big to be seen. It is the problem itself that deserves our attention, and not the various imaginative representations that were conjured up from time to time to render it bearable, even thinkable.
Put very briefly: neither in late antiquity nor in the early middle ages should we underestimate the silent pressure exercised on all Christians by the inscrutable anomaly of death. As Eric Rebillard has shown, the fear of death had been dismissed, even repressed, in some early Christian writings. But, with the victory of Augustine over the Pelagians, a current of feeling that was already widespread among Christians was allowed to come to the fore. The fear of death was accepted as an irreducible, even a salutary, aspect of human nature. It could not be dismissed by the believer.17 Fearful, or simply awe-inspiring, the hora mortis, the “hour of death,” embraced an entire block of human experience, up to and beyond the moment of death itself.
Hence the care with which Fred Paxton, in his book on Christianizing Death: The Creation of a Ritual Process in Early Medieval Europe, chose the term “liminal” to characterize a fundamental as
pect of the position of the dead person around whom the early medieval ritual of the dead came to be created.18 Borrowed from van Gennep’s study Rites of Passage, the term “liminal” conveys, in neutral language, something of the sense of anomaly, of the weight of conflicting emotional structures, and the sense of danger that surrounded the souls of the non valde mali as they left this world for the next. In the Christian imagination, the moment of death was an exact reflection, in miniature, of the terror of the Last Judgment. Theologians might be able to keep the “particular judgment” of the soul, after death, separate in their minds from the general Last Judgment of all resurrected souls and bodies at the end of time. But the fact that both were experienced as moments of intense and perilous “liminality” telescoped the two judgments in the minds of believers. Both caught the individual at a dangerous time, stripped of all customary forms of definition: stripped of the body and of an entire social persona by death; rejoined to a body, but not yet attached to a society at the moment of the resurrection, the human person waited in a state of painful depletion before the throne of Christ. Christ’s judgment would decide into which one of the two great societies to which all human beings must eventually belong the person would be incorporated—the society of the saved in heaven or of the damned in hell.
Last Things Page 6
