Last Things

by Bynum, Caroline Walker; Freedman, Paul;

  The Ireland in which Fursey had his visions was a land of virtually no state power. As a result, it was a land without amnesty. Irish kings could be as forceful and as violent as was any Merovingian, but their power remained carefully masked by a “polite political discourse” that saw them still as no more than chieftains surrounded by free clients.46 Law and order derived from “elaborate norms of conduct . . . and a set of juridical institutions that positively sanctioned adhesion to these norms.” While a state like the Merovingian kingdom could impose adherence to these norms by fear of punishment, Irish law “controlled through a system of prevention and frustration of individual autonomy, which limited the social damage any one person could do.”47 Caught in a “system of control embedded in the kinship group,” the life of a compatriot of Fursey notably lacked high moments of amnesty granted by a superior power. Such power did not exist, or, if it did, it could not show itself in so starkly “vertical” a manner. Life was controlled horizontally, as it were. It involved the unremitting accumulation and paying-off of obligations: the making of honor payments to “restore the face” of injured neighbors; the offering of mutual sureties (which could include the grim exchange of hostages); the creation of agreements sanctioned by liability to distraint of cattle; innumerable claims from kinsmen, enforced in the last resort by “the horror of a visit by a professional satirist.”48 While Gregory of Tours looked out on what was still a late Roman society, where the daily exercise of power gave imaginative weight to hopes of amnesty on the Last Day, Fursey saw no such thing. What he saw, rather, was a world in which every debt must be paid and every wrong atoned—he saw a world that was a lot more like purgatory.

  Hence the deliberately inconclusive nature of Fursey’s vision. Part of this comes from the fact that he was a man who had “returned” from the other world, with a message only about its lower reaches. But the emergence of that particular genre in itself implied a view of the world that would have puzzled a contemporary Byzantine reader, as would the many absences in Fursey’s account. The throne of God was nowhere to be seen. The escorting angels and the demons acted as if they were in a space of their own. The angels who escorted Fursey were impressive beings, winged creatures blazing with impenetrable light and surrounded by the sound of exquisite singing.49 But they lacked the brisk confidence of officials sent directly from the throne—instantly recognizable as such, as they would be in Byzantium, by their court dress.50 Nor did the demons offer their challenge according to the correct forms of Roman administrative law. They did not produce a heavy sheaf of documents to prove their claims for outstanding debts.51 Instead, the demons lined up against Fursey “in battle array,” showering him with arrows and setting up a spine-chilling battle yell.52 They knew their rights: “If God is just, this man will not enter the kingdom of Heaven. . . . For God has promised that every sin that is not atoned for on earth must be avenged in Heaven.”53 Only the angels who protected Fursey invoked a higher court by saying “Let us be judged before the Lord.” For the demons, that was the last straw: “Let us get out of here, for here there are no norms of justice.”54

  More significant still, the fire that, in a late antique imaginative model, usually ringed the throne of God—and so was thought of as the last barrier between the human soul and the all-consuming fire of the presence of God-had lost its association with that throne. Cut loose from the divine presence, the fire acted as if on its own, guarding the threshold between this life and the next: “It searches out each one according to their merits. . . . For just as the body burns through unlawful desire, so the soul will burn as the lawful, due penalty [of each vice].”55

  Fursey’s Visions may seem exotic to us, but they were not a purely local document. They were written down in northern Gaul. They circulated precisely among the new elites of Francia, to such an extent that it was almost certainly to Fursey’s own brother, Ultan, that Gertrude of Nivelles appealed for reassurance as her own death drew near in 658.56 Fursey’s account of the other world can best be seen as a complement and a corrective to the penitential rigorism introduced into Gaul a generation earlier by his compatriot, Columbanus.57 This penitential system dominated the life of many great convents and monasteries, among them Faremoutiers. Stringent penance formed the background to the dramatic deathbed scenes among the nuns of Faremoutiers that are described by Jonas of Bobbio in his Life of Columbanus. Indeed, death itself was dependent on penance. Only those whose sins had been stripped from them in a lifelong “ordeal of community,”58 which included confession three times daily,59 would be sure to pass gloriously to heaven. More than that: only those who had done sufficient penance would be allowed to set off on that journey. Jonas’s account of the deathbeds of the nuns of Faremoutiers placed great emphasis on such delays. Sisetrudis was warned in a dream that she had only forty days in which to complete her penance. Her soul was taken from her and returned on the thirty-seventh day. Angels had held a discussio—a tax-audit—of her remaining sins. Three days later, exactly on the fortieth day, even these were paid off. Sisetrudis could die: “I will go now . . . for I am now better prepared for the road.”60

  Behind many scenes, one senses the absolute power of the abbess. As director of souls and regular confessor to her nuns, the abbess was a “silent well of secrets”61 at the very heart of the convent.62 She guarded the greatest secret of all—the appropriate moment of death. Only when a nun had totally forgiven her sisters, unburdening herself of all her hidden thoughts about them, would she be set free by the abbess to go.63

  In such circles, we are dealing with a sense of the self drawn out by long delays. Whether in the space of one life alone (as was hoped to be the case among the nuns of Faremoutiers) or in the other world, the soul had to prepare itself fully before it came before the throne of Christ. It was not a self that waited, peaceably or with anxiety, to receive the magnificent, but essentially external, gesture of God’s indulgentia for as yet unatoned sins. Every moment counted. All outstanding accounts must be paid off; every moment of the past mattered, lest any escape the memory of the penitent and so fail to be included in a conscious process of repentance and atonement. For persons considerably more frail than were the nuns of Faremoutiers, this was not a reassuring prospect. A long journey of the soul, similar to that endured by Fursey, awaited every one. And in that journey, what was at issue was the weight on the individual of the “unpurged” sins of a past life. In 678/9, Barontus, a late convert to the monastery of Saint Pierre de Longoret, near Bourges, underwent such a journey. He is an invaluable specimen for us, an average Merovingian: neither a thug nor a trickster, but a middle-aged former public servant with three marriages and far too many mistresses on his conscience.64 He returned to earth badly shaken. Demons had clawed and kicked him as he made his way through the air above the countryside of Bourges. Barontus never reached the throne of God. Instead, he was brought before Saint Peter and was accused by demons who showed that they knew him better than he knew himself: “And they went over all the sins that I committed from infancy onwards, including those which I had totally forgotten.”65

  Barontus carried with him into the other world an entire life, in its full circumstantiality, made up of nothing other than the sum total of his specific sins and virtues. In that sense, the timorous Barontus was a sign of the future. In the concluding words of his monumental study, Le voyage de I’âme dans I’au-delà, Claude Carozzi pointed out that the penitent monk of this period “n’est qu’une première ébauche de la conscience de soi de l’individu en Occident” (a first sketch of the awareness of the self on the part of the individual in Western Europe).66

  The text of the Visio Baronti ended with a citation from the Homilies on the Gospels of Gregory the Great: “Let us consider how severe a Judge is coming, Who will judge not only our evil deeds but even our every thought.”67

  Like the emergence of a new hybrid species, destined to dominate the ecology in which it is implanted, accounts such as the Visio Baronti represent the fusi
on of two traditions associated with the opposite ends of Christian Europe. On the one hand, Barontus belonged to a world already touched by penitential disciplines that had grown up in northern regions whose political and social structures were frankly postimperial. The notion of the indulgentia of God lacked day-to-day support in the practice of an absolute monarchy, whose power was shown by intermittent exercise of the sovereign prerogative of mercy. Despite the massive transfer to Ireland and northern Europe of the imaginative structures of the Bible and of late antique Christianity, the amnesty of God no longer stood alone and unchallenged in the minds of contemporaries, as it had once done in the late Roman Mediterranean. On the other hand, as the citations from the works of Gregory the Great make plain, texts such as the Visio Baronti drew heavily on the introspective, philosophical tradition of the purification of the self associated with the Greco-Roman world. Even in the presence of the overwhelming mercy of God, the Christian upholders of that tradition directed the attention of their charges, if only for a moment, away from false confidence in the indulgentia of God, as emperor, to insist on the authenticity of the conversion of the penitents and on their full responsibility for the working out of their own penance.

  It is customary to keep these two worlds separate in our minds. The latter is associated with the prestige of a classical tradition of introspection and personal responsibility. The former is usually judged severely by historians of Dark Age Christianity. The penitential systems associated with the Celtic world are most usually treated as the products of a more “primitive” mentality: their widespread adoption in western Europe is seen as a symptom of the reemergence of “archaic” ways of thought in a barbarized society.68 But the two systems were drawn together by a fundamental homology. Both were characterized by relative indifference to solutions based on a model of indulgence, which drew its cogency from the practice of amnesty in an absolute, late Roman state. Once the notion of the prerogative of mercy as an attribute of the “imperial” sovereignty of God weakened in the minds of Christians in such a way that appeals to God’s power of indulgentia no longer provided a solution for the problem of the unatoned sins of the faithful, then the two traditions collapsed in on each other. What we often call the “highest” elements in classical and early Christian thought—the austere emphasis on slow, authentic change—joined what we are prone to call the “lowest” features of a barbarian Christian society—a penitential system in which satisfaction must be made for every sin. Both systems combined to create an imaginative structure that did justice to the silent weakening of the late Roman sense of the untrammeled amnesty of God.

  In this process, the image of Christ himself changed in a manner which contemporaries barely noticed but which cannot but strike an observer who passes from late antiquity to the northern world of the eighth and ninth centuries. Christ, of course, remained a great king. But He also took on the features of a great abbot. The severity of his justice was no longer intelligible solely in terms of absolute power, tempered by gestures of imperial amnesty. What Christ judged, he judged now as an abbot. He searched the heart to establish the sincerity of the penance of each person, deciding whether and when this penance had taken its intended effect. What Christ delegated to Saint Patrick was the right “to judge the penance” of his proteges.69 Christ’s power was partly modeled on the powers of the abbot of a great monastery. He became the calvus, the “tonsured” Christ of Anglo-Saxon Latin poetry.70 In the Old Icelandic kenning, Christ is the meinalausan munka reyni—“Lord without stain, who tests the hearts of monks.”71

  This evolution did not occur in other parts of the world. In exactly the same years as Fursey had experienced in one stateless society in Ireland his visions of the other world, in another stateless zone at the other end of the Roman world in the Hijaz, the visions of Muhammad had set in motion “one of the most radical religious reforms that have ever appeared in the East.”72 This reform went in the opposite direction to what was occurring in Western Europe. What emerged in the Qur’an and in the Islamic tradition, as it crystallized in the seventh and eighth centuries, was a singularly consequential reassertion of the empire of God. In a scenario of the Last Judgment more stunning and immediate even than that contemplated by Gregory of Tours, God would make plain that not only amnesty but the power to obtain amnesty through intercession depended unambiguously on God’s sovereign will. For even Muhammad’s rights of intercession, of shafa‘a, were defined as absolutely dependent on God’s prerogative of mercy: they existed only bifadhl rahmatihi, out of the supreme bounty of his mercy.73

  And this mercy remained consistently overwhelming. The most optimistic estimates of Augustine’s interlocutors in the City of God as to what the power of God’s mercy might achieve for their fellow Christians became a central feature of the imaginative world of early medieval Muslims. Whatever men or angels might think, God kept for himself “ninety-nine parts of mercy.” 74 At the very end of the Last Day, he would not be content until the last Muslim crawled out of hellfire, blackened all over like a coal, except for the unburned patches on his forehead and two knees—signs that even this frailest of sinners had prayed the appropriate prayers of a Muslim. And God would joke with him, with the bonhomie of a great king, imperturbably certain of his power, and so in a mood, after a long day, to show mercy.75

  It is helpful to take a step outside Western Europe for a moment, in this manner, lest we take its highly particular evolution for granted. In different regions, characterized by different social and political structures, a common Judaeo-Christian inheritance gave rise to very different imaginative structures. This is most apparent, of course, in the enduring contrast between Western Christianity and Islam. But, if we go back in time to the end of the sixth century, to the Italy of Gregory the Great, we can appreciate that within Christendom itself Byzantium and Western Europe had begun to go their separate ways.

  In 594, as scholars of the period know, the Dialogues of Gregory the Great sketched out, almost for the first time, the “twilight” outlines of a world beyond the grave.76 The fourth book of the Dialogues, in particular, is filled with vivid narratives of the experiences of individual souls in a highly circumstantial other world. In these narratives, the fortunes of individual souls depended on the extent to which they had succeeded or failed to make due amends through penance for their sins in this life. Yet only a decade previously, around 580, when Eustratius, a priest in Constantinople, wrote a treatise on the state of the souls of the departed, he approached the matter from an entirely different angle. What concerned Eustratius was to prove that all human souls, and most especially the vibrant souls of the saints, remained “alive” after death.77 It appalled him to think, as his opponents suggested, that the saints died only “to rest and snore” until the Last Judgment. This was not so. Eustratius insisted that this world was flanked by a great city peopled by “citizens” who enjoyed a more vigorous existence than did the living on earth. Yet that was all that he was prepared to say. The basic category that concerned him in souls beyond the grave was their “life” and energeia, the effective activity of “living” persons. The “life” of the soul was what he defended against those who appeared to deny it. Eustratius barely thought of the life of the soul beyond the grave in connection with unatoned past “sin.” Sin did not concern him greatly. He took for granted that all departed souls carried with them abiding “flecks” of human frailty. But these would be forgiven by God in a final, all-embracing, but profoundly unspecific, because “imperial,” gesture of amnesty.78

  Writing in Byzantium, Eustratius painted the other world with a broad, old-fashioned brush. In marked contrast to Eustratius, however, Gregory and his interlocutor, Petrus, set to work in the Dialogues with fine engravers’ tools. They etched memorably individual portraits, using the acid of the unpurged sins of a past life to catch a unique likeness of each person. They asked themselves, for instance, what complex calibration of God’s justice could catch the individuality of a man such as the deaco
n Paschasius. Paschasius had been a learned clergyman, a lover of the poor, altogether a figure from a late antique laudatory epitaph,79 whose funeral had even been the occasion of a miracle of healing. Yet he had been so pig-headed in his support of an antipope that he made his last appearance as a phantom in the steam of a thermal spa to ask an astonished bishop for his prayers.80 A precise notion of temporary suffering after death, undergone for particular sins, offered a way of seeing the respected, but problematic, Paschasius “in the round.”

  It was “sin” and “merit,” acquired in this life and tested in the next with meticulous precision, and not only the “life” of the soul, which mattered most in Gregory’s definition of the human person in this world and in the next. In this shift of emphasis, we have come to touch upon a remarkable achievement of the early medieval Latin West. The period has usually been dismissed as a Dark Age of Christian thought, an age of “theology in eclipse,”81 characterized by “doctrinal stagnation and the riot of imagination.”82 But the heated arguments in the other world reported by Fursey and the evidence of lively conflicts of opinion in clerical circles all over northern Europe and the British Isles that ranged over issues relating to sin, penance, and the notion of impurity combine to give a somewhat different impression of the age.83 Its principal interests were not our own, and so it is easy to miss wherein lay its principal achievements. What the spiritual leaders of the seventh century may have lacked in zest for those aspects of speculative theology that we as modern persons tend to value, they more than made up for in a heroic effort to cover all known life, in this world and the next, in the fine web of a Christian notion of sin and forgiveness. Faced with this phenomenon, I am tempted to coin a neologism. We are dealing here with the final stages of what I would call the “peccatization” of the world: not with a “culpabilization” in the sense of the fostering of a greater sense of guilt in Christian circles but with something more precise and a good deal more significant—with the definitive reduction of all experience, of history, politics, and the social order quite as much as the destiny of individual souls, to two universal explanatory principles, sin and repentance.