Last Things

by Bynum, Caroline Walker; Freedman, Paul;

  But a second cause of the terror is the sheer dreadfulness of the event itself, even for those who are saved. Christian history ends with a bang, not a whimper; and the prospect of immense multitudes of sinful souls condemned to eternal torment evokes pity, even in someone like Augustine (although admittedly not in harder hearts like Jerome, Peter Damian, or Dante). Heavenly judgment is too severe a matter to feel complacent about. But a consistent note to be found among medieval theorists about the end is that whatever happens will be just. God will do the right thing, and we can take some comfort, however small, in that knowledge. Nevertheless, the unimaginable nature of that day means that a sense of uneasiness towards it is never far off.

  Numerous medieval writers, however, argued that whereas the end is unimaginable, strictly speaking, it is still knowable. They believed that the works of the Hebrew prophets—particularly Isaiah, Ezekiel, and most of all Daniel—positively bristled with clues about what to expect and, more especially, when to expect it. The Revelation of St. John, moreover, provided a coherent blueprint of what to expect because it was, of course, the only work of authentic Christian prophecy. All that was necessary was to decode this extraordinary text. Interpretations changed over the centuries, with some writers favoring allegorical readings, others a variety of symbolic approaches, still others (though less frequently) a literal assessment. Whatever the approach, however, certain passages and images from the text soon came to dominate and center apocalyptic exegesis: the repetition of the sevenfold division of things (the seven churches of Asia, the seven angels with seven trumpets, the seven seals, etc.), the Whore of Babylon, the saintly reign of a thousand years. And even though most churchmen, beginning with Augustine, sternly condemned the practice, these images and motifs became increasingly used as tools for calculating the arrival of the end. By assigning numerical values to the letters of the Greek alphabet, Jerome identified the Beast whose number is 666 (mentioned in the thirteenth chapter) with the then-contemporary Vandal king Genseric, thereby intimating that the end was close at hand. In the eighth century, Bede laid the foundation for Joachim of Fiore’s popular heretical interpretation in the twelfth century by arguing for a seven-stage division of universal history, from Creation to Judgment Day, on the basis of the “seven churches” theme. Although Bede carefully avoided assigning specific dates to each period to remain orthodox, the clear implication of his book was that he and his contemporaries were living in the seventh age. Adso of Montier-en-Der, writing for his queen in the tenth century, drew heavily on both Jerome and Bede in positing his own apocalyptic millennialism.1

  The legitimation of this sort of exegesis, this fascination with identifying repeated motifs, figures, and numbers in Scripture in order to unlock hidden secrets that would guide one to the Last Day, had many elements in it, varying from author to author, but at least one definite characteristic was shared by them all: namely, the belief that, however awful and inscrutable God’s power may be, his love for us is at least great enough that he would sprinkle a few clues around for us. The observable structural order of creation—the regular cycle of the seasons, the constancy of the fixed stars for navigation, the predictable reaction of the body to various elements (foods, herbs, sensations, or whatever)—carried and encouraged the implicit hope that God’s creation was capable of being understood and that if God’s creation could be understood, so too might his will, thereby improving one’s chances of salvation. More than that, they hoped, God’s love led him to scatter clues to his divine plan within the Scriptures themselves, the part of creation to which medieval Christians were enjoined to pay the closest attention. At the literal level, in other words, the Scriptures informed the faithful of how to live their lives, but at the hidden level they also gave away the due date—the specific point in time by which the faithful had to get their lives in order to improve their chances of salvation. Writers and enthusiasts of this sort of scriptural exegesis, so intent on discerning the “pattern in the rug,” so to speak, would have well understood and endorsed Samuel Johnson’s famous dictum about gallows and fortnights.

  Among late medieval writers to tackle the subject, one of the most interesting is the Catalan physician-turned-mystic Arnau de Vilanova (ca. 1240–1310). Long known to historians of science for his twenty-odd volumes of writings on topics ranging from epilepsy to pharmacology, his late career as a religious reformer and apocalyptic alarmist has until recently been overlooked. Indeed, he is still virtually unknown to most medievalists, which is ironic because in his day he was one of the best-known figures in Europe.2 As professor of medicine at the University of Montpellier, he held the most prestigious position in the medical establishment; as an occasional diplomat for the Barcelona-based Crown of Aragon confederation, he was a prominent figure in French and Italian courts; and as personal physician to over a half-dozen kings, princes, and popes, he enjoyed extraordinary access to the centers of power. If that weren’t enough, widespread rumors that he had poisoned at least two of the popes he treated, Boniface VIII and Benedict XI, made him notorious, and the nature of his treatments of those pontiffs added to his reputation as something of a magus. A linguistic polymath, he translated his own scientific writings and those of others back and forth between Latin, Greek, Arabic, and Catalan. (While he seems to have had only a smattering of Hebrew, he was familiar with much of the Jewish tradition of medicine as well.) Much of the high regard historians of science have had for his work arises from his early championing of experimentation in the pursuit of scientific truth. Like only a few others before him, Arnau bridged the gap that often existed between medical theory and medical practice, and in the process he made significant contributions to the development of modern science.3

  But Arnau was no proto-Enlightenment rationalist. A powerful emotionalism pervades all his writings, both scientific and religious, and in his treatment of the ill—most famously in his care of Boniface VIII—he frequently took recourse to magic amulets, incense, mysterious rites and chants, astrological portents, and numerological symbolisms. His treatise on love-sickness (De amore heroico) especially emphasizes the point that human passions, sensations, and intuitions often provide a more reliable insight to human actions than cool, theoretical thought. In Arnau’s mind, whatever worked was right, and he remained open at all times to considering instinct and revelatory emotion as equal to the powers of reason and controlled experiment. Indeed, he believed that medical knowledge itself could be the result and consequence of divine revelation.

  Despite his high connections and busy pen, Arnau may have remained unknown to most Europeans until 1299. But in that year he took the extraordinary risk of reading to the Dominican scholars at the University of Paris the newest redaction of a work that he had originally written in 1288 and had kept hidden ever since, a work called De tempore adventus Antichristi.4 He was in Paris on a diplomatic mission for James II of the Crown of Aragon at the time, and he apparently could not resist the temptation of trying out his ideas. The timing was not accidental. Fluent in Arabic and familiar with Islamic beliefs and culture, Arnau was aware that the year 1288—the year in which he had his revelation about the approach of Antichrist—was, according to the Islamic calendar, the year 666, a reckoning rich with apocalyptic meaning. Moreover, by the time of his diplomatic errand to Paris in 1299, Pope Boniface VIII had already announced the Jubilee celebration for the following year. Religious excitement filled the air, and Arnau felt certain that the time was ripe for his announcement of the arrival of the end, which, on the basis of the ninth and twelfth chapters of Daniel and several passages in Revelation, he had determined would occur sometime between 1366 and 1376—a time close enough to inspire urgency, yet far enough away to keep alive hopes for the spiritual and social reforms needed to prepare the world for that day.

  Arnau’s hopes for a prophet’s welcome collapsed, however, when the Paris theologians condemned his book and chastised him, a layman, for daring to venture into matters beyond his concern or ability. He appe
aled his case and kept appealing it until it came before the papal consistory in 1301. By this time his case had become a cause célèbre. Fortunately for Arnau, his trial for heresy coincided with a painful attack of gallstones in Pope Boniface VIII, and Arnau’s successful treatment of the malady put the usually irritable pontiff in a conciliatory mood. While vigorously rejecting the ideas put forth in the De tempore adventus Antichristi, Boniface demurred from anathematizing either the book or its author and in the end rebuked Arnau only for having presented his ideas in public as a layman without prior permission from the Holy See.5 Arnau characteristically interpreted Boniface’s action as a tacit approval of his ideas and launched energetically into a string of new treatises and screeds that elaborated both his hypothesis about the end and the reforms required to prepare mankind for it. His success was notable. According to one papal courtier, Arnau’s predictions of the end gained support “even among the leaders [of the Church, i.e., the cardinals] . . . they say that his predictions have already begun to come true, and they fear that all his warnings will come to pass.”6

  After still more works emerged from Arnau’s pen, most notably a series of tracts attacking the intelligence and legitimacy of the “pseudo-religious pseudo-theologians” of the Dominican order, a spectacular trial at Perugia ensued in early 1304 and made him a kind of media star. (Decades later he was still mentioned, with a glint of admiration, by Chaucer at the end of the Canon Yeoman’s Tale.) A number of grim Dominicans, who regarded his claim to have unlocked, finally, the knotty mystery of the prophets and Revelation as an unendurable layman’s presumption, wanted to see his works condemned and their author imprisoned. There is some evidence that their concerns were not entirely theological. The same courtier who noted Arnau’s success at winning converts to his apocalypticism also claimed to have overheard one cardinal lamenting to another Arnau’s cure of Boniface’s illness: “If only that Arnau hadn’t come! For the simple truth of the matter is that [Boniface] would be dead and buried by now, if not for him.”7

  The next pope, Benedict XI, was himself a Dominican and had little patience with lay prophets of Arnau’s sort, especially with ones who could claim a certain degree of intellectual bona fides. Making matters worse, Arnau had since turned his energies away from Joachimite apocalyptic prophecy (on the assumption that he had already done all that he could to prove his case about the approaching end) and towards the social and ecclesiastical reforms that he thought must happen in order to prepare the world for Antichrist’s, and thence Christ’s, approach. While no formal link appears to have occurred, Arnau allied himself sympathetically with the heterodox splinter group of the Franciscan Spirituals, the radical branch of the Franciscan order that was the most zealously devoted to the idea of evangelical poverty and Church reform. The Spirituals, in short, believed that the imitatio Christi incumbent upon all clergy carried with it an absolute obligation to renounce all wealth and property and that the Church as it then existed, with its vast estates, magnificent palaces, and concern for collecting ecclesiastical taxes, had either lost or was in danger of losing all spiritual authority—precisely at the point in time when Antichrist’s approach seemed imminent and therefore the need of the faithful for a purified Church was at its highest. This was the spirit behind Arnau’s declarations of his “evangelical detestation of the corrupt practices within the Catholic orders” and especially among the “dragons and serpents” of the Dominicans, who reviewed Arnau’s every utterance with a suspicious eye from their comfortable—and in Arnau’s opinion, wholly undeserved—university posts.8

  As previously mentioned, tensions came to a head in early 1304 when Arnau, with a characteristic lack of realism, approached Benedict at a church council in Perugia in order to gain papal approval for his latest eschatological theories. To say that he failed is an enormous understatement. Benedict showed not even the slightest interest in or sympathy with Arnau’s imaginings, but he also happened to fall extremely ill during the council and agreed to put himself under Arnau’s medical care. Once again the physician took precedence over the prophet, and Arnau did his best. Benedict died, however, and suspicions arose anew about Arnau’s complicity. (We do not know enough about Benedict’s symptoms to guess what actually killed him.) Arnau landed in prison, without a papal or royal patron to protect him, and with inquisitors lining up for the opportunity to put him through the interrogational wringer. Petitions poured in from sympathizers across Europe asking for mercy on his behalf, but there seemed to be little hope. Arnau had always relied, whether he admitted it to himself or not, on the hope of a papal benefactor who might be willing to countenance his religious fantasies in return for his medical knowledge. With no pope on the scene, however, and indeed with rumors running rampant that Arnau had contrived to poison Benedict because of that pope’s insensitivity to his spiritual pleadings, matters looked grim.

  But then something very strange happened: the cardinals, immersed in the task of choosing a new pope, decided to free Arnau. No one knows precisely why, but several explanations seem possible. First, a number of the cardinals may simply have wanted Arnau out of their hair as they worked on the delicate negotiations of selecting a new pontiff. The presence of a popular, reform-minded rabble-rouser like Arnau certainly would not have made the scene of backroom bargaining any easier, given all the attention being accorded to his imprisonment. Releasing him would seem a much better option than leaving him, and supposedly his supporters, on the site of such important negotiations. Another possible explanation is that those cardinals who were reportedly avid supporters of Arnau’s prophecies managed to persuade the others that his ideas, while strange enough, were not intrinsically heretical—for how could one prove him wrong without waiting to see what happened in 1376 (the terminus of the ten-year span in which he predicted the end-times would begin)? This is perhaps unlikely, for there is evidence that to many observers it was Arnau’s lay status, not his ideas themselves, that was the issue.9 A greater possibility exists that Arnau’s age (he was then approximately sixty-five) and the shock of his imprisonment and rumored complicity in two papal murders convinced many at court that he had been left a broken man who would soon enough disappear from the scene.

  If such was the case, those hopes did not last long. Freed from prison, Arnau, whose health remained vigorous, went into a self-imposed exile at Messina, the site of the royal court of the Catalan Sicilian monarch Frederick III. He remained at court for about a year, during which time he penned a treatise for the king’s benefit called the Allocutio christiani de hiis que conveniunt homini secundum suam propriam dignitatem creature rationalis (The Address of a Christian Regarding Those Things That Pertain to Man by Virtue of His Dignity as a Rational Creature).10 In this work Arnau argued energetically for a rationalist view of the world and of mankind’s unique place in it. God gave man the ability to reason, and, Arnau stressed, there has to be a reason for that: “God and Nature do nothing purposelessly,” he had written as early as 1288. The created world operates according to endlessly complex but inherently rational principles (although, as in many aspects of Arnau’s own medical work, his interpretation of the rational seems excessively broad by modern standards), and God has given Man the power of reason in order that he might understand those principles. This is proof-positive, in Arnau’s mind, that God wants mankind to figure out the order and meaning of life. God’s truth lies imbedded in the physical world just as it suffuses and defines Holy Scripture; all that is required is to read correctly the evidence of his Truth that God has planted all around us. And since reason is the key to that ability, and since all mankind, by definition, possesses that trait, then unlocking the heavenly mysteries is not and cannot be the exclusive domain of the clergy.

  This was startling and dangerous stuff. Perhaps still shaken by his close escape at Perugia, Arnau did not circulate the Allocutio and left much of its religious argument implicit and hinted at, rather than explicitly asserted. Indeed, after making his initial argument, he quic
kly turned most of his attention in the Allocutio to advising Frederick of Sicily to adopt a number of specific social and institutional, as well as spiritual, reforms. The Allocutio is Arnau’s first work that bears unmistakable evidence of his allegiance to the heterodox splinter group, the Franciscan Spirituals (or Spiritual Franciscans), although some traces of his leaning towards them came earlier.11 This would seem to have invited an ecclesiastical backlash, but none came—presumably because the cardinals were still engrossed in the difficult search for a new pontiff, one that would ultimately result in the election of Clement V and the papal exile to Avignon.