Last Things

by Bynum, Caroline Walker; Freedman, Paul;

  Caesarius’s account of Archbishop Engelbert’s death raises some provocative problems for current discussions of eschatology and the body. First, Caesarius is curiously, perhaps surprisingly silent when it comes to speaking explicitly of Last Things. He does not employ the traditional language of eschatology; no mention is made, for example, of the Second Coming, the Last Judgment, or the Resurrection of the Dead, and in several places Caesarius even explicitly refuses to speculate on the condition of the martyr’s soul.78 The question of what happened to Engelbert at the liminal stage of his death is, in fact, addressed directly only by two demons who happened to be at the scene and subsequently inhabited the bodies of a local man and a woman. One, possessing a man in Magdeburg, rejoiced at the murder of the archbishop even as he lamented his ignorance of the soul’s whereabouts: Asked by a priest what had happened to Engelbert’s soul, the demon responded sadly (lugubri voce) “Just as his eyes were covered with blood and darkened, his soul was torn away from us, and I don’t know where it went.”79 The demon possessing a Cistercian nun outside of Cologne was rather more thorough in her account.80 She, too, lost sight of the soul at the moment of Engelbert’s death, a loss she attributed to his tearful confession the day before. “Alas!” she sighed when questioned about the soul, “it was snatched away from me and my companions who were all gathered around. [Engelbert] had prepared and washed himself so thoroughly before death . . . that we could have no claim on him.”81 The loquacious demon went on to volunteer the reason for Engelbert’s current miracle-working prowess and to describe the power he exercised as an intercessor in heaven as well as on earth: “As he lay steeped in his blood, dying, he forgave his murderers with his whole heart, saying the words ‘Father, forgive them’ etc. On account of these words he has achieved such esteem from the Almighty that he is never refused what he requests of Him. And you should know this as a fact: no archbishop of Cologne has ever sat upon the episcopal throne who can accomplish so much with God, and whose rewards from God are so great.”82 Supernatural essence notwithstanding, it is difficult to hold this demon as a terribly reliable reporter, in light of the rest of the Vita. Caesarius certainly never mentions the archbishop reciting Christ’s dying words in his last moments, and if we are to believe Engelbert himself, as he appeared in a vision shortly after the murder, his good-hearted forgiveness of his enemies did not endure beyond the grave. A canon of the Augustinian community of Klosterrath, while celebrating a memorial mass for Engelbert one week after his death, reported that the archbishop appeared to him during the service, dressed in pontifical robes and with a serene demeanor. After performing the ritual actions alongside the astonished canon, the apparition proclaimed: “Know for certain that all those who murdered me, or at whose instigation I was murdered, shall die miserably—and that more quickly than can be believed!”83

  That assertion—rather hostile, it seems, for a saint, but typical of proclamations by ordinary ghosts84—did not completely come true; many more persons had been involved in the crime than were in the end capitally punished. Still, at least for Canon Ludwig, the martyr’s words were not to be doubted. For immediately prior to his vengeful prediction, Engelbert had given what would be the most explicit statement in the Vita about the state of his soul after death. As Ludwig had reached the point in the commemorative mass where the names of the dead were recited, Engelbert had interrupted. “Brother,” he said, “it is not necessary to name me among the dead, for I am with God and in the community of martyrs, enjoying indescribable joy.”85

  It is noteworthy that, throughout the Vita, Caesarius refuses to discuss Engelbert’s glory in heaven himself because “we do not know what it is like nor how great it might be.”86 But he manages to make an aggressive argument for his sanctity nonetheless by placing testimonials in the mouths of both supernatural beings, who claim to have lost track of the soul, and of the archbishop himself, who claims already to be with God. Not only is Engelbert portrayed as attending God in the chorus of martyrs, but also, in the possessed nun’s account, as enjoying particularly high regard from him. What this amounts to is a parallel to Engelbert’s privileged status with the highest worldly authority, Emperor Frederick II (for whose son Engelbert acted as regent), during his lifetime. Indeed, the claim of the demon that Engelbert carried more weight with God than any previous archbishop of Cologne is not terribly different in essence from Walther von der Vogelweide’s assertion that he had earned more esteem within the imperial administration than any other councilor. The emphasis, in this account, is on the earning of favors; it is not God’s mercy that is at issue here, as it was in the early medieval cases elucidated by Peter Brown, but rather his justice, a justice that will repay a person’s troubles during life with immediate entry into heaven after death while punishing wrongdoers with instant and painful retribution. It is perhaps revealing of the political climate of mid-thirteenth-century Cologne—and, most likely, of Caesarius’s personal predilections as well—that the agency of God in effecting Engelbert’s redemption seems to be secondary to Engelbert’s own in suffering to achieve it. No thanks is given to God for his mercy, for example, nor do eschatological expectations about the Last Judgment and resurrection come into view directly. Engelbert’s salvation occurs immediately, and he acts in the world as a punisher or healer with the same degree of freedom and vehemence as he had as a powerful bishop-prince. Indeed, God—like the emperor—seems to be out of town for much of this narrative.

  Although his position vis-à-vis the status of the archbishop as a martyrsaint is obvious, Caesarius’s reluctance to speak directly about the archbishop’s soul probably stems from his own recognition of having created a new and not entirely unproblematic fusion of eschatological assumptions about personal redemption and immortality, a fusion that, like his unusual theory of miracles, may not have been wholeheartedly accepted by the public. And so his focus remains on the most striking and concrete evidence of the saint’s downfall and exaltation, returning again and again to the broken body as the locus and vehicle of salvation—both Engelbert’s own and that of the individuals who are cured by physical contact with it. The agony Engelbert experienced in his final moments thus replaced an extended stay in purgatory (which he clearly would have needed otherwise) and allowed him to gain full and immediate access to heaven.

  That so much attention is lavished on Engelbert’s suffering body as the site of salvation may also have important implications for the issue of gender and sanctity. As numerous scholars have pointed out recently, the body as presented in texts both by and about women was the special locus of female holiness.87 Women’s soft, penetrable bodies that wept, bled, and oozed or that were miraculously hardened and closed through prolonged fasting and virginity were seen as the primary instruments for identification and union with the Divine. By depicting Engelbert’s body as open, permeable, and prematurely fragmented and by making precisely those physical qualities the catalyst for the archbishop’s spiritual transformation, Caesarius has blurred the conventional boundaries between male and female sanctity.

  Although throughout his life Engelbert conformed to the emphatically masculine model of sanctity established in Odo of Cluny’s Life of St. Gerald of Aurillac,88 his agonizing death and the subsequent critical role of his broken body transformed him into a different sort of man. At the end of his story, we behold the dreadful and touching metamorphosis of a formidable, aggressive, and distant public persona into a pathetic mass of bleeding, naked flesh, flesh that was later intimately handled in private spaces. This ultimately redemptive shift in identity contains implications that extend beyond this figure’s personal history, however. For in Engelbert’s painful passage from life to death (and from there, to glory), we witness that decisive change in models of sanctity so often associated with the decades around 1200, when—under the influence of the mendicant orders—friars, bourgeois laypeople, and women increasingly supplanted powerful clerics and rulers as the saintly objects of popular admiration.89 The man who, like
Gerald of Aurillac, had followed the old-fashioned paradigm of the just and mighty ruler, was forced in the end to take up the qualities of so many lowlier men and women of his day who strove fervently to imitate Christ in his suffering humanity.90 Keeping in mind the Vita’s deep concern with conversion and inversion, of sudden transformations and turnings-around, Engelbert’s embodiment of two paradigms of sanctity is a judicious—if startling—solution. In order to become holy, clearly, Engelbert had to be in death everything that he was not in life. And when the archbishop encountered his radical turning point on that autumn night in 1225, he found that his body provided the fulcrum. For Caesarius and Engelbert’s friends alike, that fear-inducing, wonder-working flesh was then embraced in awe as a tangible token of one personal and very painful redemption.

  Engelbert’s hard-won salvation, however, was not an end in itself. For Caesarius, as for any pious devotee of saints, holiness resided not only in a person’s acceptance into heaven but also—more immediately—in his or her propensity to communicate with the living and to aid in their salvation. And so while by relinquishing his elevated, worldly identity and adopting a more lowly, corporeal one, Engelbert redeemed himself and earned a place in the heavenly choirs of martyrs,91 his story does not end there. It ends, significantly, with the intensive manhunt and execution of the villainous conspirators, most prominent among them Count Frederick of Isenberg.92 Following Caesarius’s example, I will conclude my discussion by examining the depiction of this other murder, a murder whose goal was essentially retributive yet became, in an unexpected twist, redemptive. Here, too, it is the body and the violence inflicted upon it that act as the pivot around which a profound moral and spiritual change takes place.93 Moreover, the explicit connections and distinctions drawn in the narrative between Frederick’s and Engelbert’s deaths throw into higher relief the role of the murdered body in the archbishop’s spiritual conversion.

  Shortly after the death of Engelbert, Walther von der Vogelweide again gave voice to partisan sentiments surrounding the murder:

  Swes lében ich lóbe, des tôt den wil ich iemer klagen.

  sô wê im dér den werden fürsten habe erslagen

  von Kölnè! owê daz in diu erde mac getragen!

  ín kan im nâch sîner schulde keine marter vinden:

  im wære álze senfte ein eichin wit umbe sînen kragen,

  in wíl sîn ouch niht brennen noch zerliden noch schinden

  noch mít dem rade zerbrechen noch ouch darûf binden.

  ich warte allez ob diu helle in lébende welle slinden.

  He whose life I praise, his death I’ll lament forever. And so I say—woe to him who has killed the noble prince of Cologne! Oh, that the earth can still bear him! I can find no torment bad enough to match his guilt: for him, an oaken stock around the neck would be far too mild. I don’t want him to be burned, or chopped apart, or flayed, or broken on the wheel or even bound to it. I’m just waiting (to see) if hell will want to drag him, still living, down.94

  Contrary to this passionate contention that no punishment save going to hell alive could possibly be horrific enough for the murderer of Engelbert, Frederick did suffer upon his capture in November 1226 an excruciating series of torments prior to his expiration.95 The event comprises the final chapter of Book II, in which Caesarius presents it as the perfect retribution by casting it as a mirror image of Engelbert’s murder. Whereas Engelbert’s death had been spontaneous and chaotic, Frederick’s was carefully orchestrated, involving a meticulous, piece-by-piece breaking down of his body by cool, indifferent, anonymous henchmen. Whereas Engelbert had been killed at night, Frederick’s punishment takes up a full day, and he finally breathes his last at the break of dawn. Whereas the high-standing Engelbert had been laid low in a ditch, nearly invisible to his perplexed companions, the morally base and socially less lofty Frederick is elevated on a wheel set upon a tall pillar, his broken limbs all too visible to the onlookers below. Finally, whereas Engelbert had tried vigorously to defend himself, struggling against his attackers, Frederick accepts his punishment calmly and passively. Curiously, it is he, not Engelbert, who dies in the idiom of traditional martyrs: in prayer and without a struggle. Ever on the alert for things marvelous, Caesarius draws attention to the disparity between Frederick’s arrogant, corrupt behavior in life and his humble and contrite attitude toward impending death, and he poignantly attributes it to a moral turnaround effected by Engelbert. The physical pain itself is what links them. While “it is fitting,” he suggests,

  that Frederick should perish in his body by a miserable and foul death, nonetheless we should hope that this same punishment was a medicine for his soul. For with contrition he shouted out both carefully and frequently, and both to himself and publicly, confessing himself a criminal, and patiently sustained the punishment carried out on himself, even offering his individual members to be broken to pieces, of his own accord. And when that merciless executioner wrought upon his back [Ps 128:3], inflicting sixteen blows with the hatchet, he did not utter a sound—so that everyone wondered.96

  The thoughtful mirroring and inversion that Caesarius constructed in the death scene are most clearly manifested in the image of Frederick’s adventus into the city as a prisoner. “But what’s more,” he relates, “God having arranged it, on almost the same day as when, one year before (anno revoluto), Engelbert was carried dead into the city [accompanied by] the grief of the masses, Frederick, with the desire of the masses, was brought as a prisoner through the opposite gate. And on the fourth day—when, that is, the first seven-day celebration was being performed with great attendance the previous year (revoluto anno)—this man was raised up on a wheel in an exceedingly unsightly manner and with many torments.”97

  The phrase Caesarius uses to convey the time lapse between the current action and the previous year, anno revoluto, captures beautifully the idea of turning around, of a movement from one point on a circle to the point directly opposite itself—in short, a conversion of the kind that, I have argued, forms the very backbone of Engelbert’s own story.98 As if to reinforce this idea, Caesarius even uses a reversal of words in the passage, moving from the construction anno revoluto when describing the double-entrance into the city walls, to revoluto anno when recounting Frederick’s death. The torture wheel—rota—brings in a further, concrete image of that turning process so crucial to the narrative. It is only when he is placed upon that wheel, one year after the commemorative mass for Engelbert, that Frederick—astonishingly—is transformed from antitype, an inverted Engelbert, to type, that is, a parallel of Engelbert. For, like the archbishop for whose death he was responsible, it is through the absolute destruction of his body that the count is ultimately redeemed.

  In Frederick’s final moments, the points on the revolving circle converge at last; as the “merit of the martyr Engelbert who, dying, prayed for his enemies”99 is passed on to his greatest enemy, the guilty one embraces that “grace” to pray for himself.100 If bleeding, breaking, suffering, and praying during the process of death provided Engelbert with the ability to work wonders, then perhaps this extension of grace to an enemy likewise experiencing bodily fragmentation—allowing his own murderer to be saved in the end-can be counted as his greatest miracle of all.

  Appendix

  Caesarius of Heisterbach, Vita et miracula Engelberti archiepiscopi Coloniensis, ed. Fritz Zschaeck, vol. 3 of Die Wundergeschichten des Caesarius von Heisterbach, ed. Alfons Hilka, Publikationen der Gesellschaft für Rheinische Geschichtskunde 43 (Bonn: Peter Hansterns Verlag 1937), 234–328. My translation.

  BOOK II, CHAPTER 7: THE DEATH OF ENGELBERT AND ITS AFTERMATH

  They arrived at the place of ambush around dusk. And behold: Count Frederick, contemplating the enormity of his villainous plan and starting to abhor it, began to say to his men, “Woe to me, a wretched man! What kind of thing is this, that I wanted to do: to murder my lord and cousin?” But those others—the same men whom he himself had sparked earlier with the breath of Be
hemoth—soon rekindled him, inciting him to the evil deed with such force that, like an asp, he grasped again all the more ardently the very venom he had rejected not long ago.

  Soon afterward, in a discussion with Herenbert, he revealed his will concerning the bishop’s murder.101 Then, in accordance with the instructions he had given his brother the steward, Frederick met up with Herenbert of Schwert and sped up ahead to where the lord archbishop was. When they reached the base of the mountain, the count declared: “Lord, this is our road.” The bishop replied: “May the Lord protect us!” For, indeed, he was not without suspicion. Having lingered awhile, the count next positioned other attendants behind Engelbert, directing them to assist Herenbert in the act he had initiated. As the bishop entered onto the concave road flanked by two narrow footpaths, the count’s servants who had been sent ahead made such a clatter as they awaited him that the lord archbishop himself wondered at the noise (so the cellarer of Hemmerode testifies today). Some of the attackers were approaching from the right side, others from the left, while still others followed behind with the count to observe the ambush. Then, as a signal to those who were hiding, Herenbert let loose a whistle so horribly loud that not only the men who were ignorant of the treachery were stunned, but so were the horses on which they were sitting. Soon those who had gone ahead drew their swords and turned back around. Seeing this, a certain soldier standing between the count’s men and the bishop shouted in terror, “Lord, get on your horse right away, for death is at the door!” (A noble youth from Hemmersbach was leading the horse behind Engelbert’s back.) Seeing that he had jumped onto the horse, the count’s attendants threw themselves upon Engelbert, one of them severely wounding him on the leg. No one went to his defense except Conrad of Dortmund, who, with his sword drawn, threw himself upon Herenbert Rennekoie. But this Herenbert anticipated him, and struck him a heavy blow to the forehead. When Conrad turned away from him, Herenbert then wounded him between the shoulders [i.e., on his back]. Pay attention: This is the same Herenbert who shortly beforehand had forewarned the bishop of the plot, so that he would be able to extricate himself should the matter turn out differently than he hoped (Vita II:3). Seeing all this going on, “all” those who were with the bishop, “leaving him, fled” [Matt. 26:56], so that the words written about our Lord through the prophet were fulfilled in them: “I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock shall be dispersed [Matt. 26:31].”