Last Things

by Bynum, Caroline Walker; Freedman, Paul;

  What makes Arnau’s thought interesting is his insistence, here and elsewhere, that death itself is a natural phenomenon when it comes as the denouement of a lived-out existence and is in such a case morally neutral. Spiritual health, in other words, makes physical health essentially irrelevant; illness—unless it be the natural decline of bodily vigor at the close of a long life—may serve as a warning sign for individuals to engage in necessary spiritual regeneration. Christ, as the medicus supremus of all Creation, presents sickness to mankind as nothing so much as an opportunity for reform. But for those whose souls already exist in vigorous purity—like the Carthusians (and, by clear implication, Arnau’s much-favored Spiritual Franciscans, who also practiced austere physical self-denial)—bodily malaise, while a genuine suffering that deserves attention and treatment, cannot be simplistically equated with spiritual disease.

  So what does this imply for the end of time? It’s hard to say, and Arnau himself never dared venture a guess. It seems likely, however, that he , expected the end to make physical soundness itself irrelevant even though the faithful may be assured of the resurrection of their bodies. Arnau seems far too implicated in a materialist understanding of human nature to posit anything like a literal rejuvenation of the dead—a miraculous return of the youthful, vigorous, and hale bodies of our early adulthood instead of the decrepit, worn-out things we leave on our deathbeds—which leaves us with the assumption, given all that went before, that Arnau presupposes that the physical state of the resurrected faithful is an irrelevance. He makes no claim to know the physical condition of the saved, although his understanding of the body as organic material suggests that he would dismiss the notion of youthful bodies being restored to those who died at great age. Bodies on that day may or may not be cleansed of illness or decay; the essential point is that the spiritual joy of the faithful will make such a question inconsequential. The joy of reunion with God will, if anything, make us unaware of our bodies—for who could turn their eyes away from the Lord in order to inspect their limbs? We cannot and will not know exactly what is going to happen on that day. But what a blessing God has given us, he concludes, in at least letting us know, via the encrypted messages in Scripture and Creation, when to expect that of which we cannot know what to expect.

  Of Earthquakes, Hail, Frogs, and Geography

  Plague and the Investigation of the Apocalypse in the Later Middle Ages

  Laura A. Smoller

  For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes in divers places. (Matt. 24: 7)

  Then the angel took the censer, filled it with fire from the altar, and threw it to the earth. And there were noises, thunderings, lightnings, and an earthquake. So the seven angels who had the seven trumpets prepared themselves to sound. The first angel sounded: and hail and fire followed, mingled with blood, and they were thrown to earth. (Revelation 8: 5–7)

  Before the outbreak of the universal pestilence later known as the Black Death, according to a letter seen by the fourteenth-century chronicler Heinrich of Herford, a tremendous earthquake struck the Austrian region of Carinthia. In the same year, “fire falling from Heaven consumed the land of the Turks for sixteen days”; “it rained toads and snakes for several days,” by which many men perished; and “pestilence gathered strength” in many parts of the world.1 Similarly, the chronicle of the Austrian monastery of Neuberg recorded both the Carinthia earthquake and disturbing phenomena associated with the initial outbreak of the plague “in eastern parts.” First, through the corruption of the air, men and beasts were changed into stone.2 Second, a “lethal rain” mixed with pestiferous snakes and worms fell “in the regions where ginger comes from,” which instantly killed all it touched. And, third, not far away, “a terrible fire burned from the sky” and consumed all it fell on, so that the very stones “burned as if they had been naturally changed into dry wood.” The smoke from that fire was extremely contagious and killed many merchants a long way away. Even those who escaped carried its deadly contagion with them and so brought the plague to Greece, Italy, Rome, and neighboring regions.3

  A similar confluence of signs appears in a letter written in Avignon by Louis Heyligen and quoted in the chronicle of an anonymous Flemish cleric. According to this letter, a province in the eastern regions of India had suffered terrible and unheard-of storms for three days. On the first day “it rained frogs, snakes, lizards, scorpions, and other poisonous animals.” On the second day, there was thunder and lightning, and “hailstones of an incredible size fell,” killing nearly every person. On the third day, “fire with a fetid smoke descended from heaven” and killed the remaining people and animals in the area and destroyed all the cities and towns there. According to Heyligen’s letter, it was assumed that these storms had caused the great plague that then spread with south winds blowing from India to Christendom.4

  Earthquakes at home. Rains of fire, hail, snakes, and toads in the east. These contemporary authors described the onset of the great pestilence not just with terrifying omens, but specifically with language drawn from Christian apocalyptic. Plagues, after all, feature both in Revelation (16: 8–11, 18: 8) and in the apocalyptic portions of the gospels (Matt. 24: 7, Luke 21: 11).5 Chroniclers who described such portents at home and abroad mapped God’s apocalyptic torments onto an orb whose image already was pregnant with the religious meanings apparent in the great mappaemundi. In these chronicles, snakes, toads, hail, and fire all rained down in the east: the land of marvels and monsters, of Prester John and Gog and Magog, of the enemies of the faith and of potential Christians. Plague moved from east to west, from pagans to Christians. Mapping its progress represented an attempt to understand, and thereby control, the disease.6 But it also helped situate plague within an apocalyptic frame of reference. At the same time, these signs and prodigies were not without meaning in scientific efforts to explain plague. Earthquakes, snakes, toads, and stinking smoke also formed part of medical descriptions of the plague’s etiology. The plague treatises, I will argue, form a critical moment in a longer trend of attempts to naturalize the apocalypse. This trend in turn was one aspect of the larger late-medieval project to naturalize marvels by extending the explanatory scope of natural philosophy. At a time when scientific speculations about the apocalypse had become problematic, plague writings reopened the door to such an analysis. They did so by their reliance on phenomena that defied strict categorization either as purely natural causes or as wholly supernatural apocalyptic signs.

  In summary, plague in many ways both invited and defied the attempt at naturalizing. By mapping plague onto a geography with eschatological import and by locating its causes in apocalyptic-sounding signs, I will argue, fourteenth-century authors entered into a tangled web of symbols. Each aspect of their treatment of the plague set off a whole host of free-associations in the realms of natural philosophy and of apocalyptic. Fourteenth-century writers appeared to be unwilling to say that plague was either entirely natural or entirely apocalyptic. Their writings, by their very ambiguity, opened up the possibility that plague might be simultaneously natural and apocalyptic. By implication, these treatises raised the possibility that the apocalypse might indeed be explained by natural causes. Thus, the speculations plague engendered helped set the stage for a thoroughgoing scientific investigation of the apocalypse in the following century.

  Mapping the Plague and the Geography of the Apocalypse

  In the fourteenth-century writings about the plague mentioned above, the authors locate the most bizarre phenomena associated with the outbreak of pestilence in the distant east. Likewise, according to physicians at the University of Paris, the effects of the triple conjunction of 1345 that caused the plague would be felt more in “southern and eastern regions,” areas in which their text strongly implies a number of portents such as falling stars have been seen.7 These phenomena, which, as we shall see, had meaning in both apocalyptic and scientific interpretations of the pl
ague, explained the observed fact that the disease traveled from east to west. Mapping has been called a form of conquest and control of territory,8 and mapping plague’s progress was perhaps an attempt at mastering and possessing the feared disease, just as the naturalizing of its causes, as we shall see, marked an effort to bring inexplicable tragedies under the control of human understanding. But in plotting plague’s progress on a map of the world, fourteenth-century authors found themselves mapping plague on an earth that already had religious meaning, and, specifically, eschatological import.

  Home to the plague’s origin and the most striking phenomena associated therewith, the east had, in fact, long been associated with both marvels and with apocalyptic traditions. From classical times, the east was the land of monstrous races, unusual animals, untold-of wealth, and incredible diversity. It was the site of both the earthly paradise and of flesh-eating scarcely human monsters.9 If fire and worms were going to rain down anywhere, why not in the east? But if plague was mapped onto a world that put the disease’s mysterious origin in the already marvelous east, that same mappamundi provided localization for aspects of the drama of end times, whose nearness the plague and its harbingers seemed to indicate. It was clear, for example, that the last act of that drama would be played out in and around Jerusalem (Rev. 20: 9), the world’s center in the mappaemundi and the setting of history’s central moment: the crucifixion.10 In The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (probably written in the first decade after the appearance of the Black Death), the author asserts that the Last Judgment will take place at the foot of Mount Tabor in the Vale of Jehosaphat.11 One strand of the considerable body of Antichrist lore put that fiend’s birth or at least his youth in the cities of Capernaum, Chorozin, and Bethsaida in Galilee.12 But, just as the mappaemundi visually depicted the history of salvation moving in time and space from Eden, at the map’s top, to Jerusalem, at its center, a fuller chronology of end times would also have to show a movement from the periphery in towards that center.

  One aspect of an apocalyptic movement from periphery inwards appears in the Cedar of Lebanon vision that circulated from the early thirteenth century and found a new life in the hands of a number of chroniclers in the wake of the outbreak of the Black Death. That prophecy, like other late medieval visions of the apocalypse, looked to a period of peace and calm before the final confrontation that would usher in the world’s end. Among the features of that time of peace would be a universal conversion to the Christian faith or, as the Cedar of Lebanon vision expressed it, “Within fifteen years there will be one God and one faith. . . . And the lands of the barbarians will be converted.”13 This prediction rested ultimately upon the passage in the gospel of Matthew in which Jesus tells his disciples, “And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in all the world as a witness to all the nations, and then the end will come” (Matt. 24: 14).14 After the conversion of the barbarians, according to the same vision, there was to be “a universal passage of all the faithful” to the Holy Land prior to the appearance of Antichrist. Mapping this scenario in space and time would produce a movement from the periphery—locus of conversion—to Jerusalem, the center and goal of pilgrimage.15 And since Christendom had already reached the western limits of the world, as Hugh of St. Victor had pointed out in the twelfth century, by the fourteenth century everybody knew that the lands to be converted lay to the east (beginning, lamentably, with the Holy Land itself).16 This final conversion was one of the goals of the thirteenth-century Franciscan missionaries to Asia like William of Rubruck and was the hope implicit in both Mandeville’s Travels and the belief in Prester John, a Christian king somewhere off in the mysterious east.17 The eastern locus of this end-time missionizing thus meant that the movement of the unfolding apocalypse—at least insofar as conversion was concerned—would be a movement from east to west, just as plague itself moved from east to west, from the lands of infidels to the lands of Christians.

  In fact, several fourteenth-century chronicles dealing with plague adduce an anecdote that reflects at least the hope that these eastern lands would be converted to the faith in plague’s train. The English chronicles of Henry Knighton and the monastery of Meaux, for example, relate how an eastern ruler or people decided that the plague raging in their lands was the result of their lack of Christian faith. Sending representatives to Christendom in order to begin the process of conversion, they discover that plague is present among Christians as well and return home with the conclusion that their planned conversion would in fact be futile.18 This tale may be read as anti-apocalyptic; after all, plague does not initiate a final universal conversion in the story. Nonetheless, it demonstrates that the plague’s appearance at least engendered the hope that the anticipated universal conversion was at hand.

  Another type of motion embodied within apocalyptic beliefs has to do with the movement of enemies. Again, here, plague writings appear to parallel this eschatological geography. As described in Revelation, when Satan is released after being bound for a thousand years, “he will go out to deceive the nations which are in the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle” (Rev. 20: 8). These forces will advance upon Jerusalem (“the camp of the saints and the beloved city”), where they at last will be consumed by a fire from heaven (Rev. 20: 9). In this movement of apocalyptic enemies, there is also a motion from periphery to center, from the four corners of the earth to Jerusalem. Unlike the movement of universal conversion, however, this amassing of enemies was understood in the fourteenth century to be not simply a movement from east to west, but also a movement from west to east. In the final days, there would be enemies without and enemies within Christendom, all of whom would converge upon Jerusalem. As Roger Bacon wrote, “For [Gog and Magog] must obey [Antichrist]: therefore, if they break out from one part of the world, he will come forth from the opposite direction.”19 But who precisely was meant by the phrase “Gog and Magog,” and whence would they come?

  One tradition increasingly elaborated in the Middle Ages equated Gog and Magog with enemies from without, specifically with the barbarian, indeed almost antihuman, tribes long since enclosed behind an iron gate by Alexander the Great. By the fourteenth century, these enclosed peoples had also been firmly identified with the ten lost tribes of Israel and were associated with the Amazons (who were said to be either their guards, their wives, or their overlords). Near the end, according to this series of traditions, Alexander’s gates would be opened, and Gog and Magog would rush out to join the forces of Antichrist and to terrorize Christians.20 Where exactly one might find Alexander’s gates and the enclosed nations was less clear, however. By most accounts Gog and Magog were to be found somewhere in Asia. But some authors placed them in the Caspian Mountains; some, in the northern extremes of Asia; others, in islands of the northern sea; and yet others, in the extreme northeast corner of the orb.21 Even with these discrepancies, it is apparent that the release of Gog and Magog from the iron gates would result in a roughly east to west movement as the forces of Antichrist moved on from Asia towards Jerusalem.22 Could this east-to-west movement of enemies have been linked to the westward progress of plague?

  There may indeed have been some interconnections, as fourteenth-century chroniclers mapped the plague’s progress onto an east-west trajectory already understood to have eschatological significance. Here again the bizarre signs that accompany the plague’s eastern outbreak in the fourteenth-century chronicles come into play. Interestingly, textual descriptions of the enclosed tribes of Gog and Magog not infrequently are accompanied by references to snakes, worms, and reptiles—the very portents fourteenth-century authors localized to the initial focus of the plague in the east. The widely read Revelationes of pseudo-Methodius, for example, describes the enclosed tribes as living filth, who on their release not only will feed upon human flesh and blood, but also “will eat unclean serpents, scorpions, and all of the most filthy and abominable kinds of beasts and reptiles which crawl upon the earth.”23 In Mandeville�
�s Travels, the ten lost tribes (Gog and Magog) are enclosed within a range of mountains surrounded by a great intraversible desert that is so “fulle of dragounes, of serpentes, and of other venymous bestes that no man dar not passe.”24 And Roger Bacon in the Opus maius reported the very words by which Alexander the Great supposedly described these horrid tribes as poisonous reptiles: “O Earth, mother of dragons, nurse of scorpions, guardian of serpents, and sinkhole of demons, it would have been easier for you for this hell to be enclosed within you than to give birth to such races! Woe to the earth, producer of fruit and honey, when so many serpents and beasts assail her!”25 Snakes, scorpions, vermin, and reptiles textually accompany the outbreak of the plague in the east as well as the release of Gog and Magog and the peoples enclosed by Alexander.

  A second tradition about Gog and Magog, stemming from an Augustinian reading of Revelation, interpreted the names allegorically as referring simply to the enemies of God in general and not to any literal race of peoples in any specific geographical location. This interpretation encouraged Christians to see Gog and Magog as the enemy within, reinforcing the equation of Gog and Magog with Jews, not so much the ten lost tribes, but those Jews still living among medieval Christians.26 These two interpretive traditions could come together, as in the treatment of Gog and Magog in Mandeville’s Travels. There the author avers that when the enclosed Gog and Magog (ten lost tribes) break out in the final days, they will join forces with Jews living among Christians, who will lead them into Christendom “for to destroye the Cristene peple”27 and then, presumably, to march on Jerusalem. Gog and Magog in Mandeville, although localized and identified specifically as Jews, combine the notions of internal and external enemies of Christendom.