Last Things

by Bynum, Caroline Walker; Freedman, Paul;

  Bonvesin exemplifies what Bynum calls “the emphasis on the glory and salvific potential of suffering flesh” not only through Christ’s passion but also through Mary’s compassion, her “suffering with” Christ.31 The great attention given to Mary’s sufferings in the Red Scripture is common in contemporary accounts of the passion or of the deposition, both in literary works and iconographic representations.32 In Bonvesin’s poem, Mary’s enormous suffering in seeing Christ’s passion moves closer and closer to that of her son and ends in a sort of identification with it. Their sufferings are described in the same way: Mary’s compassion blends with Christ’s passion and she becomes him through her pain.

  From Mary’s first appearance on the Calvary hill, her sorrow is immediately physical: “When she had seen her Son in such a sorry plight, she felt overwhelming sorrow, so intense and so absolute that she was as if dead, her limbs so lifeless that no man alive could describe it. She bore tormenting anguish for her Son, agonized sorrow, sorrowful agony. She wept and groaned, she was so full of tears that her anguished heart swooned” (Red Sc., 11. 137–48). When Christ’s limbs are in agony on the cross, Mary’s limbs express her pain: “Seeing her Son’s limbs so torn, battered and bloody and so disfigured, bruised and wounded from head to foot, filthy and defiled with abuse and garbage, she was afflicted with immeasurable afflictions, with agonizing anguish, very harsh and profound. Her limbs were all weighed down with great sorrow, the sorrows she bore will never be counted” (Red Sc., 11. 221–28). The idea of Mary suffering not only in her soul but also in her flesh was common in sermons and literature of the late Middle Ages.33 This idea is connected with the identification of Mary’s flesh with Christ’s flesh: Christ’s and Mary’s bodies are a true unity, and what happens to his flesh also happens to hers. In this case, Mary’s flesh feels the humiliations inflicted on her son’s body and the nails driven into it.34 At the same time, the human being was conceived of as a union of body and soul and pain was also understood as the experience of a psychosomatic unit. Mary’s sorrow becomes therefore physical, expressed through her body.35 She is not beaten directly and she does not bleed, but her emotional participation in her son’s passion and her love for him transform psychic anguish into bodily pain.

  Like Christ’s, Mary’s suffering is limitless. It is described as strikingly similar to her son’s.36 When the text was recited orally, it must have been difficult to distinguish Mary from Christ because they are described in the same way and they speak the same language. Thus Bonvesin expresses through words what in painting is expressed through the representation of Mary’s body in the same attitude as Christ’s.37 Mary’s love for Christ makes her suffering his. Through her empathic participation in Christ’s agony, she unites with him. An earlier text makes the assumption behind such imitatio, or identification, clear. In explaining that Mary was “transformed into the likeness of Christ,” Bonaventure quotes Hugh of St. Victor that “Vis amoris amantem in amati similitudinis transformat,” the power of love transforms the lover into an image of the beloved.38 In the Red Scripture Mary’s love (“inama” in 1. 283) for Christ moves her to ask not only for death but also for the opportunity to take part in the physical passion of her son. She begs the Jews to crucify her as well: “O God, precious son, whom my heart loves so, may you receive me into your Passion in my suffering and woe. O miserable Jews, you should kill me too, seeing that you nail my Son to the cross. Come and crucify the mother along with Him. Take vengeance on woeful me along with my Son by any death you wish” (Red Sc., 11. 283–88). Although she is not physically on the cross, Mary suffers as though she were. Her pain is the same as her crucified son’s. Indeed, through compassion, she suffers the crucifixion.39 The boundaries between Mary and Christ are so confused that she can even ask for his compassion (1. 320). But during her immeasurable suffering, whose physicality is underlined by the summarizing expression “portar stradura disciplina” in line 252,40 Bonvesin suggests her redemption:

  His sweet mother, seeing these events, seeing her son lingering in great torments, and the dishonor, invective, and great abuse, and slander and mockery done to Him on the cross, writhed to and fro, so sorrowful was her heart, and wept with tears and great groaning, collapsing from anguish. Her lamentation was such that her grief cannot be described. . . . She could scarcely contain the suffering in her, so very harsh and great was her suffering. No greater woe could she have on earth than to see her Son’s passion. She was groaning so, her limbs seemed to be dissolved in tears on tears, and she was stricken with much woe seeing her Son so torn and abused, dying little by little. She felt such anguish, she could not speak. But when her tongue tried to speak, her crushing suffering blocked her tongue, she writhed full of woe and sorrow. She could not speak, her voice failed her, she writhed and lamented and lamented and writhed, she sighed and wept, she wept and sighed—no one could have imagined the suffering she displayed. Such was her suffering that no man born ever felt equal anguish, felt equal pain. Through the mother’s demeanor it was revealed that immeasurable suffering dwelt within. Oh the great compassion of our great Queen, of that sweet mother who is our remedy, who groaned and lamented so at such destruction, taking for her Son very harsh discipline (Portand per lo so fio stradura disciplina). (Red Sc., 11. 213–53)

  When Bonvesin utters “Oi grand compassïon dra nostra grand regina,” he highlights the connection between Mary’s compassion and her status of queen, suggesting that what makes her a queen is her compassion. Through her “stradura disciplina,” she attains the greatest glory. Not only do Christ’s words to his mother in line 385—“you will come with me in time”—affirm that Mary will go to paradise after death, but, as we have seen, Bonvesin even believes in her bodily assumption to heaven.41 “Regina”—queen—is the term that first defines Mary when her clarity is described in heaven (Golden Sc., 1. 327); it refers to her glory, which is complete because she is there with her body. We know what glory consists of: Mary’s compassion, which is shown through her physical identification with the tormented body of her son, allows her to redeem the imperfection of the body through which she suffers and to attain the splendor of resurrection.42

  If it is through his suffering that Christ attains glory for himself and the possibility of redemption for others, suffering is at least as central in the figure of Mary. But both Christ presented in his suffering humanity and Mary presented as the model of compassion are examples for the rest of humankind. With his writing and through the emotions it elicits, Bonvesin hopes to reform the behavior of his public. As he says in the opening of the poem, his aim is that the public respond to his poem with “heart and mind.” At the end of the fifth glory, which consists in contemplation of the faces of Christ and Mary, merit is attributed to attendance at masses and help given to the poor, but also to love for Christ, which made the just man call up Christ’s image in the heart and in the mind (Golden Sc., 11. 401–2). The reference is to the contemporary well-developed cult of the Veronica: the material image of God was understood as a mediator between Creator and creature and the very act of viewing implied the desire of viewers to resemble the one they had in view.43 Bonvesin’s poem is a sort of “verbal Veronica.” About the same time that the Veronica started to be conceived not as a portrait but as the imprint of the very suffering face of Christ on a piece of cloth, Bonvesin suggested that his account of the passion is written in the very blood of Christ. The poem aspires to the same goal as the Veronica: to mediate between Christ and man. The capacity to suffer bodily is what we have in common with Christ; suffering is what we can use in order to move toward him. Especially through the figure of Mary, suffering indicates a path to union with Christ:44 Mary’s compassion can be viewed as the exemplar of the empathic reactions that the poet is attempting to instigate in his public.

  It is Christ and Mary’s suffering flesh that gave them a site in which redemption can take place. But, as is made clear by Bonvesin in the passage from the De peccatore cum Virgine quoted above, their fl
esh is our flesh, and thus we too can suffer. After reminding his listeners at the beginning of the poem that their beloved bodies are decaying and rotting, Bonvesin indicates to them, through the example of Christ and especially of Mary, the way to redemption, whose sweetness he is about to describe in the Golden Scripture. After the description of Christ’s passion, Mary’s compassion, and the anticipation of their glory attained through suffering, the final passage of the Red Scripture is a synthesis of the several practical suggestions scattered throughout the text, especially in the words of the blessed at the end of each glory.45 Just before the description of the glories of the good man, which will entice the listeners, the central section of the Book of the Three Scriptures ends with an invitation to compassion:

  We have related the harsh Passion which Jesus bore unremittingly. There is no man of worth who could reflect on this without giving himself up to great compassion. There is no one on earth, once he has properly listened to the passion of that admirable Lord and how He was betrayed and tormented, no one so impudent or so hardened that he ought not to be filled with fear and affliction. There ought to be no one who would not bear in peace . . . when he heard the dreadful Passion which Jesus our true Lord bore for us. It should be no burden to him to bear deprivation, shame, and poverty through winter and summer, and hunger and thirst and cold, disgrace and sickness, affronts and wrongs of all sorts inflicted upon him. Tribulation should be no burden to him, nor forgiving those who affront him, nor living in penitence with great affliction, nor mourning for his sins with great contrition. Food and drink should give him no pleasure when he reflects that the King of Glory was slain thus for our sakes yet had never committed sin or culpable action. For the sake of us wretches, He was reduced to such degradation. (Red Sc., 11. 425–48)

  Con-passio, “suffering with,” is the means by which we can assimilate to Christ and attain redemption: through patience, humility, penitence, and ascetic practices, our ability to experience suffering, body and soul, gives us access to salvation and to the wonderful fullness of glory. At the very end of the poem, after the explicit description of glory as integrity of the person, soul and body, without the fear of decay, Bonvesin stresses again that humankind gains glory through love: “We have told of the golden script, which is sweet to read, agreeable and refined. There is no person born who reads this script that should weary of winning such glory. If the script were only read with great love, there is no one in the world who would hesitate to live in penitence, so that he might gain such a life that he would never tire” (Golden Sc., 11. 741–48). Through suffering with our miserable but so important body, Bonvesin tells us, we can win the sweetness of glory: we move from the corruption of the earthly body to the splendor of the resurrection body through suffering. Or, in the imagery of the threefold scripture, we move from the fear of black to the seduction of gold through the cleansing power of blood.

  PART II

  APOCALYPTIC TIME

  Time Is Short

  The Eschatology of the Early Gaelic Church

  Benjamin Hudson

  “Great Fear Fell Among the Men of Ireland before the feast of John [the Baptist] of this year [1096], until God spared [them] through the fastings of the successor of Patrick and of the clergy of Ireland besides.”1 The panic of 1096 is a curious episode in Irish history, and this laconic statement in the contemporary chronicle known as the Annals of Ulster is one of its few records of society beyond the powerful princes and higher clergy. This cultural terror at the approach of a saintly festival that the Gaels believed to be a preview of the Day of Judgment leads to the question of why they were prepared to believe in the disasters associated with an event whose horrors were unknown elsewhere in Europe? Part of the answer is that the panic of 1096 reflects the interest in eschatology found among the Celtic peoples of Britain and Ireland. With the advantage of hindsight, that panic can be seen as the logical conclusion to ever greater speculations about final judgment that had become embedded in medieval Celtic intellectual and popular culture and reached a climax in Ireland in the eleventh century, as even sober historical texts concluded their factual narratives with accounts of the world’s end.2 This is most visible in works from the Gaelic-speaking lands where, in the rich harvest of literary and theological works, the theme of Last Things is found frequently and prominently, so much so that an excessive interest in eschatology and the supernatural has become an accusation hurled at medieval Irish theological works.3

  The development of ideas about the final days that were important and, to the Gaels, believable found inspiration from a variety of sources, of which the Bible was the basis, especially the apocalyptic passages in the Gospels and the Book of Daniel.4 In addition there were apocryphal texts such as the Apocalypse of Thomas, the Life of Adam and Eve, and the Vision of Paul that were circulating throughout Europe.5 To these was added an original element from the heroic and adventure tales, with their rich store of pre-Christian belief, in which mortals and spirits together fought and loved in a landscape that was at the same time reassuringly familiar and hauntingly different. The resulting literary creations varied in content, from scholarly considerations of the Last Judgment (with descriptions of hell and its horrors as well as of heaven and its joys) to tales of fantastic voyages in which sailors met souls in the shape of birds waiting for the end of time or conversed with Judas, who was chained to a rock in the ocean. Two works—the Voyage of St. Brendan and the Vision of Tnúdgal—passed into the general canon of European literature. The Voyage of St. Brendan was circulating round Francia during the early eleventh century, when a monk of Cluny named Raoul Glaber incorporated several episodes in his Five Books of Histories.6 By the following century, a Norman-French version of Brendan’s voyage was composed for the court of the English king Henry I (1100–1135). The author, known only as Benedeit, had as a patroness Henry’s queen, either his first wife Matilda or his second wife Adeliza.7 The Vision of Tnúdgal became no less popular after its composition (in Latin) circa 1149, and its international popularity ensured that this vision would be translated into numerous vernaculars during the Middle Ages before it was finally written down in Irish, the language of its author, in the sixteenth century.

  Early Views on Doomsday

  The surviving writings from the primitive Celtic church give little indication of the rich harvest of eschatological thought that would later flourish. There is little involved speculation on the end of time, even though there was constant attention to the subject and a belief in its imminent appearance. The influence of the second-century bishop Irenaeus of Lyons is visible in the earliest writings, especially his treatise Against Heresies, which stresses the imminent coming of judgment.8 In the fifth century, St. Patrick gave a simple statement of belief in his Confession with the notice that he was living in the last days, awaiting Our Redeemer who would return as judge of the living and the dead.9 An only slightly more fulsome statement is made in the next century when, in the longest of the letters attributed to him, the British author Gildas described the depravity of humanity during the Last Days, which he identified as his own time, when the forms of Christianity were practised without any Christian spirit.10 A generation later, Columbanus echoed his view on the imminent arrival of the Day of Judgment when he wrote that the world was in its last days.11 As late as the eighth century, the same idea is repeated in the Old Irish gloss on 1 Corinthians 7: 29, in which a commentary on the passage Tempus breve est states “that is, this is the end of the world, it is not worthwhile to love it.”12 Even in poetry from the second half of the eighth century there was little elaboration, and the vernacular verses of Blathmac are sparing in their use of imagery to describe Doomsday.13 Belief in the quickly approaching end of the world apparently inhibited any attempt to describe that conclusion.

  Those unadorned recitations of faith did not exclude an interest in personal eschatology, as seen in a seventh-century after-death vision related by the eighth-century Anglo-Saxon historian Bede in his Ecclesiastica
l History concerning the vision of the Irishman Fursa [III. 19], which can be usefully compared with another vision story found in the same work, that of the Anglo-Saxon Drythelm [V. 12].14 Both visions give an indication of eschatological thought, but with some significant differences. The vision of Drythelm is immediately concerned with Drythelm himself, but it also reveals a structured plan for souls after death in addition to a brief exposition on the fate of those souls at the Last Judgment and the state of the world. There is a fourfold division of souls—the good, the not entirely good, the not entirely bad, and the bad—which is later found in Irish works such as the first Vision of Adomnán. In contrast with Drythelm, Fursa’s vision is personal and his soul is escorted by two angels through the otherworld, where he sees other angels reading from a book of life (libellus vitae) and learns that he is destined for Paradise. Waiting for the sinful, however, he sees four fires, which will purify the world. He is escorted untouched through a fire in which he sees burning the soul of a man whom he knew, but Fursa himself is burned by a demon for having accepted goods from that man and is warned by an angel of the dangers of accepting tithes acquired by sinful means. Fursa’s vision shows the early Irish Church’s preoccupation with private devotion and penance. There is no grand scheme; the individual’s preparation is all that is important. The lack of interest concerning Doomsday in Fursa’s account reinforces the attitude of immediate expectation found in the statements of Patrick, Gildas, and others. His vision does show the importance of the physical appearance of the body as a sign of divine judgment because the blow from a demon, according to Bede, had been seen by witnesses after Fursa’s return/reawakening to this world. Physical pain or disfigurement from contact with otherworldly beings is occasionally found in other works. A contemporary of Bede named Adomnán, abbot of the community on the island of Iona and upon whom was fathered the authorship of the two vision-tracts (which will be discussed later), claims that the monastery’s founder Columba received a visible scar from an angel who was angry because of his refusal to carry out a divine order.15 At this early date, there is a preoccupation with the form and nature of the body after death, a concern that would be amplified in later works.