Last Things

by Bynum, Caroline Walker; Freedman, Paul;

  Arnau took advantage of the relative calm and the amenities of Frederick’s court to produce his major religious work, the Expositio in Apocalypsi (Commentary on Revelation).12 We do not know for certain whether he finished the book during his Sicilian tenure, but he almost certainly wrote most of it while there. He mentions Clement V, who became pope well into 1305, at a point over three-fourths of the way through the long book, and we know that Arnau only ended his island idyll in order to present his Expositio to the new pope, hoping once again to win a papal protector and legitimator. The Expositio both fascinates and infuriates; more than any other of his religious books it shows all of its author’s strengths and weaknesses. Passages of considerable insight, of venomous spite, and of gargantuan hubris all jostle with one another for position on the page. We do not know Clement’s specific reaction to the book, but he clearly dismissed it and this must have disappointed Arnau considerably because only a few years earlier Clement (then Bertrand de Got, archbishop of Bordeaux) had expressed sympathy for Arnau’s plight in the contest between Boniface VIII and the Dominicans over Arnau’s theories about the Antichrist. Still Arnau did not give up hope. As late as 1309, when he was near seventy, he continued to send his new writings to Clement; and on at least one occasion, he traveled to Avignon in order personally to read a new work to him.13

  The Expositio begins cagily. Arnau distinguishes carefully between visio and intellectus, “vision” and “understanding.” Only true prophets, those uniquely blessed by God and the precursors of the Christian clergy, possess the power of visio; but intellectus, while a God-given gift in the way that any remarkable human talent is, is something that is at once both lesser and greater than visio. It is lesser because its possessor cannot claim the same sort of mystical union with God that a true prophet enjoys and that enables him to speak as a mouthpiece for the Lord himself, but greater because those with intellectus may yet legitimately claim to understand the truth of someone else’s vision, provided that God grants such a person the power to understand, and even to understand that vision better than the prophet himself who experienced it. Arnau’s point is not that God favors an Adam Smithian sort of specialization of labor but rather that God suits both his revelations and the understandings of them to the points in history when they are needed. Citing the case of Daniel—the figure on whom Arnau’s calculations of the end most depend—Arnau asserts that Daniel’s prophecies, for example, as understood by the Jews of the second century B.C.E. sufficed for the needs of that time. But as centuries passed and Christ’s appearance on earth ushered in a new revelation of God’s design for man, such prophecies take on different meaning and require different interpretation, for “the messages contained in visions lie buried deep within them” and “God, who is the author of all visions, grants the proper understanding of them . . . whenever He wishes and to whatever extent He wishes.”14

  The various explications of Daniel’s prophecies by Christian writers, whether mystical, moral, symbolic, allegorical, or literal, have once again been geared, according to Arnau, to the specific needs of the times they were written, so that those later expositors’ understanding of the vision is “even greater than” that of the original prophet. The time has now come, Arnau concludes, to move beyond these sequential and one-dimensional interpretations, to synthesize their wisdom, and to offer a full and final reading of the Scriptures. By pairing the works of the prophets with the apocalyptic text of Revelation, Arnau argues, the certain truth of what we can expect at the end, what it will mean, and when we may expect it, can at last be revealed. What makes this possible is the very bounty of God’s goodness: since he has always given as much revelation of his Truth as was needed throughout history, now that history is soon to end, the time has come for God to make his final revelation via the person or persons who possess both the spiritual health and the reason-based intellectus that will allow them to see the Truth and to see it whole.15

  In this way Arnau cleverly avoids claiming prophetic gifts for himself—which would have guaranteed the reopening of charges of heresy against him—while nevertheless establishing himself as a legitimate prophetic voice. And what does that voice say about the end (apart, that is, from the timing of its arrival, which he had already dealt with in earlier works)? His Expositio offers, for all its claims to completing and perfecting the explication of the Revelation, a thoroughly, if not quite conventionally, Joachite eschatology, although he does refine Joachim’s system somewhat by emphasizing throughout the heightened importance to be played by the “proclaimers of evangelical truth” who made up Arnau’s most ardent followers—both among the Franciscan Spirituals and among evangelical laypersons. He follows the standard format of verse-by-verse glosses. The angel of 1:8, who announces the revelation to John, is likened to the “angelic pope” predicted by Joachim but also represents the universi praecones incorrupti evangelicae veritatis. In fact, Arnau suggests, the latter group is likely to be more important than the “angelic pope” and his clergy because the trumpet blast that began John’s vision came from behind him (I:II): God, Arnau hints, always speaks directly to his established clergy, and this sort of indirect communication can only signify that it is the nonclerical faithful who will receive, and who in fact already have received, the full intellectus of the end.

  Most of the rest of the Expositio repeats, with some slight modifications, the traditional Joachite interpretation. Thus the three persons of the Trinity correspond to the three ages (status) of history, to be calibrated against the seven periods (tempora) of history as represented by the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit and the seven churches of Asia to whom John speaks. Since the seven churches symbolize the Church as a whole, all of the spiritual and social reforms that must be accomplished before the end must be spearheaded by the angelic pope, but Arnau introduces an evangelical correptor (from corrigere, “to correct” or “to improve,” rather than from corripere, “to snatch” or “to steal”) who will serve as the pope’s spiritual adviser and guide.

  But what, specifically, will happen to the faithful once the correptor and the “angelic pope” have fulfilled their missions and have purified as much of the expectant world as possible? What will our bodies physically experience? Bodily resurrection of the dead and the physical assumption of the living have stood at the center of Christian eschatology at least since Paul wrote his epistles.16 But will the faithful enter paradise in their healthy twenty-year-old bodies or in the weakened persons of their dotage? Will physical imperfections, even relatively harmless ones like nearsightedness, persist? Does it matter? Here the Expositio in Apocalypsi remains maddeningly silent—but then, so does Revelation itself. The fact that Arnau, following John, never attempts to describe God’s appearance in anthropomorphic terms but only refers to it as “an impression of light” tells us little. John mentions crowds and voices, multitudes and choirs, but angels, not humans, dominate his vision, and consequently Arnau’s exposition.

  The fact that Arnau’s medical writings and medical activities continued throughout the last two decades of his life, after his evangelical conversion, suggests that he saw his medical and religious callings as compatible. “All the sciences share in a common usefulness, namely the acquisition of perfection in the human soul, preparing it, in effect, for all future happiness,” he wrote in his Commentum super canonem “Vita brevis.” Moreover, he repeatedly referred to medicine as “the most noble of sciences” and “the summit of nobility.” He singled out St. Luke, a physician, as uniquely important among the four Gospel writers; in his Address at Bordeaux, for example, he boldly chastises his critics: “I tell you, that if anyone rejects my religious writings simply because they were written by a physician, then he does not walk in the path of Christ, since Christ himself did not exclude physicians from understanding the sacred teachings.” And in what might have appeared in another writer as a mere rhetorical flourish but in his case clearly flirted with danger, he often described Christ himself as the medicus supremus and me
dicus summus of all Creation, whose Truth was literally the best medicine for mankind.17

  Correlating physical health with spiritual health was a common conceit in the Middle Ages, but Arnau took the idea to new heights. Two basic paradigms existed for understanding human nature, and each had an influence on Arnau’s medical and religious thinking; the first, associated chiefly with the Jewish tradition, defined man as enlivened flesh, an essentially corporeal being temporarily brought to life by God’s infusion of spirit; the second, more explicitly Christian in nature, viewed man as embodied soul, an essentially spiritual (and thereby timeless) being momentarily given a physical aspect. Both paradigms posited a correlation between physical and spiritual well-being, but the connection was considerably stronger and more explicit in the latter—and it was this fact that lay behind the large dose of what we today would call magic in medieval Christian medicine.18 Arnau’s use of amulets, incense, and astrology in treating Boniface VIII’s gallstones in 1301 reflected this connection because the “magical” aspects of the treatment aimed, in theory, at curing the spiritual component of Boniface’s ailment while the “nonmagical” treatments (warm baths, soft foods, weak broths, and some herbal medicines) addressed the physical component. Boniface himself indirectly endorsed the soul-related nature of medicine and the body when, joyfully recovering from his complaint, he announced to the papal court “I did not realize it until now, but now I proclaim it aloud—this man [Arnau] is the greatest cleric in the world!” To describe Arnau as a clericus clearly implied a recognition in him of some sort of spiritual power. Boniface’s words no doubt also bolstered Arnau’s hopes of papal support for his apocalyptic prophesying.19

  Those hopes were dashed, however, when Boniface refused to endorse Arnau’s eschatology (although Arnau made it a point, in subsequent years, to point out that Boniface had never formally condemned his ideas either). When Boniface died two years later, after being assaulted by Philip IV’s henchmen at Anagni, Arnau penned a blistering essay, De morte Bonifacii VIII, in which he attributed the pontiff’s death to the sickness of his soul rather than to the violent humiliations inflicted on his aged body. What was that soul-sickness, according to the physician? Boniface’s refusal to recognize the truth of Arnau’s religious message.20 An assertion this audacious might well have led to arrest, were it not for the fact that Boniface had left so many enemies behind him. One can easily imagine some figures at court furtively enjoying Arnau’s declaration that Boniface had died of his own spiritual wickedness. Whatever the case, no trouble arose from the essay and its extraordinary claims. It is worth noting, however, that Arnau did not dare to offer a similar spiritual autopsy of Benedict XI.

  Shortly after completing his Revelation commentary, Arnau tried during the papal interregnum to gather support from other branches of the Church. He appealed to a handful of bishops, mostly Catalans and Provençaux, whose sympathy he thought would be helpful; but he also turned, somewhat unexpectedly, to the Carthusian monastic order, which was then embroiled in a debate with its critics over the propriety of giving severely ill brethren meat to eat to improve their strength as opposed to the ideal of complete meat avoidance. While often overlooked by historians, the questions of whether to eat meat was briefly as significant an issue to the Carthusians as the definition of poverty was for the Franciscans in the years around 1300. The relative smallness of the order and its austere isolation probably account for the neglect and also raise the issue of how Arnau got involved with the Carthusians. It seems highly unlikely that the order sought out Arnau’s help in resolving its dietary dispute; he was far too suspect a character. Instead, Arnau probably saw his entering the fray as a way to regain some of his lost respectability after the debacle at Perugia and his Sicilian exile. However it came about, Arnau quickly produced a treatise De esu carnium (On the Eating of Meat) that defended the practice of meat abstinence in both medical and spiritual terms. Though still unpublished, it offers a useful window into Arnau’s thinking on human nature and may suggest what, if anything, he expected to happen on the Last Day.21

  Every aspect of human life, Arnau argues, is suffused with moral meaning. The decisions of everyday life—whether to drink a cup of wine, to work at one’s trade, to bathe, to make love with one’s spouse, or to read a book—are both the products of and influences upon our moral and spiritual well-being. (In the health regimen that he composed for King James II of the Crown of Aragon, Arnau even attributed a moral element to the act of breathing: not only did the king’s body require fresh air for health, but so too did his mental capabilities and powers of judgment, and therefore the earthly well-being, and ultimately the spiritual fate, of James’s subjects depended on the king’s proper breathing.) As God’s supreme creations, our souls and bodies are, in their natural state, wholly healthy and perfect. True, the temporal encapsulating of our souls in human flesh carries with it the unavoidable stain of original sin, but the waters of baptism restore us to pristine perfection. From that point on, life is a continuous moral combat in which nothing is without spiritual meaning.

  Arnau’s case for Carthusian meat abstinence rests on five main arguments: the logic of love, the necessity of tradition as the best defense against heresy, the evidence of medical science, the authority of Scripture, and the evidence of direct observation. It is an interesting combination, one that reflects Arnau’s privileging of the traditionally Christian definition of human nature as soul-within-a-body as opposed to the traditionally Jewish notion of body-given-life. Three of the arguments deal with the soul, while only two deal with the body, and yet in this text Arnau is writing specifically as a physician rather than as an apocalyptic prophet. The arguments run roughly as follows.

  1. The logic of love. Critics accuse the Carthusians of failing to love their ill brethren by withholding from them a form of nutrition that would alleviate their bodily suffering, yet the Carthusians’ vow of meat abstinence results from, and serves as an expression of, their absolute love of God. It is demonstrably illogical, Arnau argues, to insist that a practice that emerges from the greatest of all possible loves can ever devolve into, or be interpreted as, an absence of love. To love God with such totality is to love all those who offer God the same love, the same vow, the same totality.

  2. Tradition as bulwark against heresy. Given his own notoriety as a heterodox thinker, Arnau here flirts openly, if characteristically, with danger. He identifies two types of heresy: overt opposition to the Church’s teachings and authority and the assertion of novel ideas about the universal human condition—in essence, the redefinition of human nature. The Church’s own long history, he points out, validates the practice of abstinence, whether from meat or any other substance, and therefore to assert the illegitimacy of meat avoidance in principle is in effect to reject the Church’s historical authority and is therefore tantamount to heresy. On the second point, he argues that to insist that human bodily survival is impossible without meat consumption is essentially to redefine the very nature of the human body—a universalizing activity if ever there was one—that runs contrary to medical knowledge, the teachings of Scripture (where does the Bible say that Jesus ever ate meat?), and the observable longevity of vegetarians. Arnau concludes by pointing out that Jesus himself, according to both Matthew and Luke, urged his disciples: “Do not worry about your life and what you are to eat, nor about your body and how you are to clothe it. For life means more than food, and the body more than clothing” (Matt. 6: 25, Luke 12: 20).

  3. Medical evidence. This point receives the most amplification and specificity; indeed, it accounts for over half of Arnau’s text (disregarding the introductory and concluding passages). It shows Arnau at his most Galenic, emphasizing the proper balance of “vital forces” and “humors.” Setting aside violent causes for the time being, he says that death results either from disease or from malnutrition. If a condition arises from disease, the proper course of treatment is medicinal—in which case the introduction of meat into what has previous
ly been a meatless diet will either prove to be futile and irrelevant at best or will prove harmful at worst by disrupting the natural balance of forces and humors. If the problem is indeed nutritional, however, then substitutes for meat (such as egg yolks and diluted wine) represent more medically sound choices because meat itself is most appropriate for individuals regularly engaged in vigorous physical activity, which is hardly an accurate depiction of Carthusian life.

  4. Scriptural authority. This brief section of the treatise comprises a highly selective dietary summary of biblical history. No fatted calves here: Arnau mentions only those examples that meet his purposes. David gave bread, figs, and raisins to the servant of the Amalechites; Jesus distributed bread and fish to his famished followers; while Paul instructed the Romans that “People range from those who believe they may eat any sort of meat to those whose faith is so weak they dare not eat anything except vegetables. Meat-eaters must not despise the scrupulous” (Rom. 14: 2–3).

  5. The evidence of our eyes. Arnau notes with a certain malicious glee—the same sort of emotion that lay behind his delighted singling out of incompetent Dominican physicians at Paris—that Carthusian monks are indeed famous for their longevity, with many reaching the age of eighty and a few particularly blessed individuals reaching ninety, one hundred, and beyond. A diet lacking meat, he concludes, shows no deleterious effect on the monks in general and therefore cannot in any way be considered a fault or shortcoming in their life regimen. Those who cannot recognize this obvious fact are fundamentally unqualified to judge Carthusian practice. The net result of these arguments, whether explicit or implicit, is that what is good for the soul is good for the body, though not necessarily vice versa, and herein lies the essential difference between the Christian and Jewish traditions with which Arnau was so familiar. A healthy soul provides proof-positive of a healthy body, barring exceptional circumstances, while an unhealthy body offers only an indirect and imperfect index of spiritual health. Death is not necessarily a failure, regardless of the age at which it strikes. But spiritual death or spiritual illness (as in the case of Boniface VIII) directly influences, and may even determine, physical well-being. This sounds confusing: if the soul is healthy and pure, why should that not guarantee physical soundness? And doesn’t the fact of final illness and death therefore imply something about one’s failed spiritual state?