Last Things

by Bynum, Caroline Walker; Freedman, Paul;

  This was distinctly not the case for Engelbert. In his sermon on the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10: 30), preached immediately after the murder, Caesarius openly laments the archbishop’s journey in life from Jerusalem to Jericho—the route along which the man of the parable was attacked by robbers and left for dead:34

  And perhaps, as most people suppose, God wanted to erase his descent from Jerusalem to Jericho [through his death]. Through Jerusalem, in which the temple was and therefore true religion, are indicated things spiritual; through Jericho, things worldly and secular. While [Engelbert] had been bishop and duke, he directed his attention less to those former things and went far down into the latter. This happened to such an extent that one of our monks said to him, “Lord, you are a good duke, but not a good bishop!”35

  In the Vita, too, Caesarius does not hesitate to inform us of the future archbishop’s “complete and manifold” absorption as a youth in “the glories of worldly things” (even while already holding several high ecclesiastical offices);36 he portrays him as completely entrapped by “nets of demons, tools and snares of sinners.”37 How, then, was Caesarius to explain the postmortem Engelbert, who appeared in visions performing mass—in one instance, his own memorial mass—or clad all in white and riding a mule humbly into church?38 In seventy-nine recorded episodes over a period of ten years, this new Engelbert healed the blind, deaf, crippled, and insane and punished disbelievers, working miracles both through his relics at Cologne and through his blood soaking the ground at Gevelsberg.39 And his sanctity was recognized now not only by those men and women who experienced his powers directly, but was also asserted by demons, who grudgingly praised the saint and described his heavenly status through the mouths of possessed people.40 How could this be? The matter worried the knights and merchants who, Caesarius informs us, were apt to declare: “We cannot in any way believe that this proud, greedy man, entirely given over to the world, is able to work miracles”41—and the issue clearly bothered Caesarius as well.

  And so, as a preface to his account of Engelbert’s postmortem, holy activities, Caesarius offers a most unusual theory. The wonders that were occurring both at the archbishop’s tomb in Cologne cathedral and at the site of his murder must not be regarded, he explains, as “the substance of sanctity, but are a certain signal of sanctity. Nor would it have been necessary,” he continues, “that bishop Engelbert be distinguished by miracles after death if his life had been more perfect before death. The blessed Ebergisil and Saint Agilolf, both bishops of Cologne, both innocents murdered by guilty men, were crowned with martyrdom. They nonetheless were distinguished after death by rather few miracles, since it was not necessary that miracles recommend after death those whom a most holy life had recommended before death.”42 This argument represents a surprising departure from traditional theories of the miraculous—and it was deliberately so, as we can see from Caesarius’s pointed distortion of the truth that many miracles had in fact long been attributed to the earlier bishops.43

  As the compiler of a monumental collection of miracle stories, Caesarius was certainly aware of contemporary theoretical discussions of miracles and was one of the first to offer a definition of miracles as violating the ordinary course of nature.44 But although the exact nature of miracles and their relation to individual sanctity was under debate at the time, most theologians agreed that true miracles were worked by God through a person distinguished by his or her individual merits.45 Of course, it was difficult in the Middle Ages (as it remains today) for an individual to be acknowledged widely as a saint if he or she did not work miracles after death, regardless of his or her virtues during life. Nonetheless, miracles were tricky things; they could be performed fraudulently, for example by magicians or disguised demons, as well as legitimately by real saints, and medieval people were careful to distinguish between “true” and “false” displays.46 One way of ascertaining that miracles were real and not delusions or falsely inspired was to examine the wonder-worker’s life, whether it conformed in virtue to the astonishing deeds and whether this was a person through whom God would want to work.47

  In the eyes of many of his contemporaries, Engelbert was clearly not such a person, and it was probably to counter popular skepticism that Caesarius contrived his unusual miracle theory. His claim here is that the miracles of Engelbert must be understood as signifying not a holy life—for as everyone well knew, the archbishop was little concerned with either spiritual or pastoral duties—but rather a holy death. In order for his miraculous capacities to be explained convincingly, Engelbert’s murder had to be presented as a type of radical conversion, a reversal and a negation of his former, worldly life—the last-minute equivalent, one might say, to St. Francis’s famous renunciation of his father’s goods while still a young man, and a satisfactory substitute on earth for purgatorial penance. As Caesarius states in the first chapter of the Vita, “The sanctity which he lacked in his life was replenished in full by his death; and if he was less than perfect in his manner of living, he was nonetheless made holy through his suffering.”48

  Although Caesarius insists throughout the Vita that Engelbert had died “in defense of the Church,” thus aligning him with traditional martyrs, he continually presents this especially gruesome manner of death as being of interest in itself. It was the unwarranted outpouring of blood, the broken bones, the grief and humiliation—for its own sake more than for its political significance—that made Engelbert like Christ, Thomas Becket, and the other holy men and women of the time who embraced physical pain as an exhilarating, expiatory state of being.49 In one remarkable passage, Caesarius begins to justify Engelbert’s status as a martyr, citing various “causes” of martyrdom—innocence as in Abel, love of law as in the Maccabees, and so on—and aligning his hero, finally, with the internationally popular Thomas Becket.50 (Engelbert seems, in fact, to have provided Caesarius with a figure well suited for what seems to be a particular sympathy of his for innocent victims of violent crime; he proclaimed the martyrdom of Margaret of Louvain, a young girl who was raped and murdered during a robbery of her family’s home, in nearly identical terms.)51 “In modern times,” Caesarius argues, [Christ] “was murdered in Saint Thomas, bishop of Canterbury, because of the need to maintain the liberty of the Church. The same cause of death existed in our leader Engelbert.”52 Having found a suitable parallel, he proceeds to demonstrate the men’s essential sameness on several points: “That man [Thomas] was murdered for the freedom of the church of Canterbury; this one, truly, for the defense of the church of Essen. That man freed the English church from the heavy yoke of King Henry with his blood; this one, by a similar death, entrusted the church to his protection from the unbearable demands of Count Frederick.”53

  However, Caesarius continues, Engelbert should be admired as an even greater saint than his English counterpart because of the horrid particulars of his death.

  And although the blessed Thomas sustained many troubles, damages and exile before his passion that Engelbert did not sustain, in [Engelbert’s] passion it is certain that he had, nonetheless, more grief, anguish and distress than Thomas had borne. That man indeed (as we read), struck in the head with a single blow, was left in the temple by sacrilegious men; this one, his entire body bored through with many wounds by very many brigands, was left naked on a dungheap. Saint Thomas was murdered by men who openly hated him; but Saint Engelbert54 . . . by relatives and friends from whom he had anticipated nothing bad, and whom he himself had raised up. (emphasis added)55

  “This tends,” says Caesarius, “to induce greater grief and to increase ill-feeling” (emphasis added).56 What Caesarius is arguing, in other words, is that for all the similarities in cause with St. Thomas, Engelbert surpasses that famous martyr in glory because he suffered more in his death. I have emphasized certain phrases within this passage in order to point out the importance Caesarius places on Engelbert’s pain—both physical (the body “bored through with many wounds”) and psychological (“greater gr
ief” and “ill feeling”). Unlike early martyrs and those described in the slightly later Golden Legend, who likewise died under violent and painful conditions but remained joyous, Engelbert died sad.57 In that respect he is assimilated to Christ, who was also abandoned by his friends and executed by people to whom he had done no wrong. Brutally mauled by “many brigands,” including his own relatives and supposed allies, and abandoned as a bloody, naked, and vulnerable cadaver, Engelbert died not with a typical martyr’s confidence and self-righteousness—enjoying the painless “anesthesia of glory” so characteristic of other martyrs58—but with a violent struggle, in confusion, pain, sadness, and humiliation. His emphatically undignified death contrasts with his orderly, controlled, dignified life. By genuinely suffering, both physically and psychologically, Engelbert inverted and negated his former secular life and was transformed—in the formulation of St. Paul borrowed repeatedly by Caesarius—from a “vessel of wrath” into a “vessel of glory.”59 That punishment on earth was enough to override any expiatory punishment after death that would otherwise have been necessary. For all his outrage and bitterness against them, Caesarius thus seems to have Count Frederick and his allies performing a service to the archbishop by shedding his blood.

  The notion that suffering could function as a means of erasing sins or filling in moral deficiencies was not, of course, a new idea with Caesarius but had a long tradition in medieval thought. Writers such as St. Bonaventure applied it first of all to Christ himself—his suffering for the sins of humanity, it was held, overreached the bounds of ordinary human pain, to the extent that his body was more perfect than ordinary human bodies.60 Engelbert’s suffering, too, was greater than most people’s—even than that of other martyrs such as Thomas—but this, it is argued, was because he was more in need of penance than they. Caesarius tells us that as the archbishop’s companions washed and examined the corpse the day after the murder, they counted forty-seven wounds on it and bestowed on those wounds a profoundly personal meaning by associating them with certain holes in Engelbert’s spiritual life.61 As Caesarius recounts, “In every one of the members in which he had sinned, he was punished. He was punished many times in the head, namely on the crown, on the forehead, on the temples, lips and teeth—and so severely that rivulets of blood, flooding and flowing down, poured into and filled the hollows of his eyes, ears, nose and mouth to overflowing. He was also punished on the throat and neck, on the shoulders and back, on the chest and heart, on the stomach and hips, on the legs and feet.”62

  Through his very language, with its steady rhythm and repetition, Caesarius here directs us point by point through the saint’s body, pressing us to envision and replay the torments it had experienced. Caesarius’s insistence on the active role of his readers (or listeners) in that process is made explicit in the next clause; he has carefully enumerated the archbishop’s wounds, he continues, “in order that you, reader, might recognize with what kind of baptism Christ deemed worthy to wash away whatever guilt his martyr had incurred through being proud, through seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, thinking, being immoderate, working, touching, walking, and any other kind of frivolities, omissions and negligences of discipline whatsoever. . . . Surely, surely not without reason did he arrive at the glory of a martyr!”63 It is important to recognize that there were liturgical precedents for Caesarius’s graphic description of the dead man’s body parts and the role they played in his spiritual state. The rites for the sick and dying in the late ninth-century Sacramentary of Sens, discussed by Frederick Paxton, provide a striking structural parallel in their call for the anointing of the sick person “on the neck, and throat, and chest, and between the shoulders, and on the five corporeal senses, on the eyebrows, on the ears inside and out, on the end of or within the nostrils, on the outside of the lips, and similarly on the outside of the hands, so that the stains that have in any way adhered through the five senses of the mind and body by the fragility of the flesh of the body, these may be cast out by the spiritual medicine and the mercy of the Lord.”64 Of course, Engelbert’s death occurred too suddenly for the formal rites of the dying to have been performed. But both the language of the passage on the washing of the corpse and the ideas it contains on the linkages between body and virtue (or vice) make it clear that Caesarius understood the flooding of Engelbert’s body with blood to substitute for its anointing with oil—a type of penance through blood such as has been studied in depth by Arnold Angenendt.65 In this way, what had appeared in the Vita to be a chaotic and sloppily executed attack (see Appendix to this chapter) became an act highly charged with positive religious meaning.

  The wounds on Engelbert’s corpse were not to be perceived only as signs pointing to the martyr’s past faults. Rather, they were also the tangible stage from which God performed an intensive series of supernatural spectacles. At first it was surprising for Caesarius that Henry, the cellarer of Hemmerode—who had tried to defend Engelbert from the attack—experienced “no horror” while guarding the body the night after the murder, “such as usually arises from [contact with] the cadavers of murdered people.”66 Caesarius attributes this unusual bravery to the “presence of holy angels, who were exercising a heavenly watch around the martyr’s body.” (But, he continues, “this Henry had been a knight prior to his conversion, and was therefore probably better equipped and more brave for this kind of work than most people.”67) Such boldness in overcoming revulsion to handle the corpse was visibly and immediately rewarded in other cases. During the transport of the body back to Cologne, an older monk also named Henry was cured of a chronic limp when, “contemplating the blessed man murdered as an innocent by guilty men,” he “touched the murdered man’s bare arm with his own bare hand.”68 But the priest who had refused to let the corpse spend the previous night in his church—“claiming that the basilica would be contaminated, whereas it would in fact have been more greatly consecrated by the martyr’s blood”—was “punished very severely, by divine will, on his body even today.”69 During its night at the monastery of Altenberg, the immanent power of the corpse and the intensity of the brothers’ emotions were such as to induce in some of them “wonderful visions of the martyr’s glory” while they slept.70

  In an earlier paper in this volume, Peter Brown discusses the attitude toward the bodies and souls of the deceased manifested in the prayers of sixth-century religious men and women.71 Those persons, he argues, were confronted with a “bruising paradox” as they washed and examined the lifeless flesh of their companions, for what they recognized in those moments was that “a human soul, released from the body and still ‘soiled’ with the dirt of life in a sinful world now drew close to the immense purity of God and His angels.”72 This attitude—and the sense of eschatology it entails—could hardly be more different from that manifested by Engelbert’s friends as they cleaned his battered corpse and counted his wounds. Indeed, it appears that they perceived the experience in exactly the opposite terms: for them, the soul was made pure—and manifested its proximity to God—precisely through the messy materiality of the body. Bloody limbs that could heal or hurt a person on contact must have been seen as virtually crackling with divine energy, so that along with grief, anger, and compassion, they also had the capacity to arouse feelings of awe and admiration. The friends of Engelbert did not need to pray that God have mercy on his “soiled soul,” as Brown’s sixth-century people might have. In contrast to those who understood divine mercy to come “as much from outside [the soul’s] own power to cleanse itself as did the act of the washing of the soiled, helpless corpse,”73 Engelbert’s companions knew that the very fact of their having to clean the body of blood and dirt meant that the soul was already clean. The soul had been purified through the body’s violation.

  And so, just as baptism with water could send an initiate out into life with a “clean slate,” Engelbert’s bloody end acted as a purification ritual that negated his former life and readied him for immediate entrance into the heavenly ranks.74 It thus con
stitutes the critical turning point in the archbishop’s life, a parallel to the calls-to-holiness experienced by many male saints in middle age or female saints in youth.75 Unlike his contemporaries Francis of Assisi and Elizabeth of Thuringia, whose holiness was visible to those who knew them,76 however, Engelbert began to function as a saint only once his body had been hacked apart and his previous life forcefully inverted. Aligning him with the suffering Christ, Caesarius draws attention to the importance of the end in effecting that conversion. “The sun having hastened to its setting,” he says,

  the victim hastened to the altar with his sacrifice, so that an evening sacrifice (the most worthy under the Old Law) might be made to the Lord. Christ suffered on a Friday, at the sixth hour (that is, at midday), in order to display himself as a mediator between God and men. He wanted Engelbert, however, to suffer on the same day but at the end of the day, in order to show him crowned through a good end, and not through his preceding life. . . . Just as it was not proper under the Old Law to present a sacrificial animal without a tail, neither will a good life without a good end be pleasing to God.77