Last Things

by Bynum, Caroline Walker; Freedman, Paul;

  This eschatological movement of enemies coming from within may also have been in the minds of fourteenth-century chroniclers writing about the plague. The massive burnings of Jews in the plague years, after all, rested upon the belief in an international conspiracy of Jews to poison the water supplies of Christendom, a conspiracy seen as an alliance of enemies without and enemies within.28 The interpretation of Gog and Magog as enemies within finds expression also in the fourteenth-century chronicle of the cathedral priory of Rochester. The chronicle’s author, probably William Dene, asserts that the recalcitrance of now-scarce laborers after the plague must arise from the influence of Gog and Magog. “It is therefore much to be feared,” he writes, “that Gog and Magog have returned from hell to encourage such things and to cherish those who have been corrupted.”29 William Dene seems to lean towards the Augustinian exegesis by saying that “Gog and Magog have returned from hell,” for he neither identifies Gog and Magog with any known enemy, such as the Muslims or the Jews, nor gives them a specific earthly home base. Rather, they are belched forth from hell—literally the bowels of the earth—not unlike the earthquakes described by other fourteenth-century authors. In contrast to the eastern rains of snakes, worms, frogs, and fire, earthquakes in fourteenth-century plague writings take place close to home: in Carinthia for Heinrich of Herford, in England itself for the chronicler of the Yorkshire abbey of Meaux.30 Spewing out noxious fumes from the belly of the earth, earthquakes bespoke internal corruption hiding under the surface and waiting to break out, just like the enemy within, be it the Jews or the lax Christians who would be Antichrist’s prey.31 The earthquakes close to home in plague chronicles resounded with reminders of the enemy within, just as snakes and poisonous reptiles raining in the east pointed to the enemy without.

  The geography of the apocalypse thus could impose itself upon and provide one set of meanings to the geography of plague. Its progress mapped, charted, and analyzed by fourteenth-century authors, plague nonetheless defied the possession and control that geographical knowledge represented. Even as authors attempted to “tame” plague by mapping its progress, the multiple meanings in the places associated with plague could lead readers and authors into an endless web of free associations in which earthquakes, snakes, and toads served simultaneously as metaphors for corruption, apocalyptic signs, and natural causes of disease. The same pattern is apparent in fourteenth-century authors’ attempts to give plague a natural explanation. Although they appear to believe that explaining plague by natural causes will lay their apocalyptic fears to rest and bring the disease within the control of human understanding—if not prevention and cure—their explanations lead them into the same web of eschatological signs, portents, and free associations. It is almost an unspoken hope in these writings that if plague can be explained in natural terms, then it cannot betoken the nearness of the end. But it proved impossible to read the plague as entirely natural and not at all apocalyptic. Fourteenth-century chronicles can jarringly announce the apocalypse and naturalize the very signs that indicate its nearness without comment or coming down on one side or the other.

  Apocalyptic Signs and Natural Causality Before the Black Death

  Many fourteenth-century authors described plague in overtly or implicitly apocalyptic terms by relating the epidemic to other physical signs associated with the end in scripture and prophecies. The understanding of such signs had gone through a number of changes in the centuries leading up to the Black Death, however. Whereas previously medieval Christians had assumed that such apocalyptic portents would be sent directly by God, in the thirteenth century some natural philosophers were assigning natural causes, such as astrological configurations, to apocalyptic portents.32 By century’s end, however, there had been a backlash against a scientific study of the apocalypse.

  According to Scripture, key signs and portents would herald the nearness of the apocalypse. Many of these signs figure in the fourteenth-century plague writings. Earthquakes, for example, had particular religious meaning. Earthquakes appear frequently in Scripture, not simply as manifestations of divine anger and mechanisms for the deliverance of the just, but also specifically as apocalyptic signs. For example, in Isaiah 29: 6–7, God’s promised deliverance of Jerusalem from her enemies is effected by thunder, earthquake, storm, and devouring fire. An earthquake accompanies Christ’s death on the cross and rolls back the stone covering his tomb in Matthew. Yet another earthquake frees the apostles Paul and Silas from prison in Acts 16: 26. Most importantly, earthquakes feature among the signs of the end enumerated in the synoptic gospels (Matt. 24: 7, Mark 13: 8, Luke 21: 11). And the largest constellation of earthquakes occurs in Revelation itself, in which there are no fewer than five earthquakes accompanying the torments unleashed therein against the enemies of God (Rev. 6: 12, 8: 5, 11: 13, 11: 19, 16: 18).33 Earthquakes in Scripture thus can be direct manifestations of God’s anger, including the fury reserved for the enemies at end times.

  Many medieval chroniclers interpreted earthquakes along similar lines, as the result of God’s wrath or as warnings thereof. These earthquakes have—it is implied—supernatural causes. For example, in Gregory of Tours’s History of the Franks, earthquakes appear among a number of other portents (visions in the skies, comets, unusual weather, and rains of snakes and blood) announcing disasters, including epidemics of plague and dysentery and the appearance of false prophets. Gregory implies that these are signs of the end by quoting apocalyptic texts from Matthew and Mark alongside his enumeration of such portents. He also describes these portents as “the kind which usually announce the death of a king or the destruction of entire regions,” again likely envisioned as the result of God’s direct action and not the workings of secondary causes.34

  The thirteenth-century chronicler Matthew Paris, too, made much of earthquakes and other supernatural portents as apocalyptic signs. His writings demonstrate the way in which, under the influence of Aristotelian natural philosophy, authors were carefully separating out natural and supernatural events. In Matthew Paris’s conception, such phenomena point to the apocalypse precisely because they can have no natural causes. As he wound up his Chronica majora in the year 1250, for example, Matthew noted the singular number of “prodigies and amazing novelties” in this twenty-fifth half-century “since the time of grace,” a half-century he fully anticipated would be the world’s last. Among these prodigies were eclipses, floods, unexplainably large numbers of falling stars, and earthquakes.35 Not simply the number of portents, but specifically their inability to be explained by natural causes pointed towards the looming apocalypse. For example, Matthew Paris had described an earthquake that happened in England in 1247, thought to be particularly significant of “the end of the aging world” in that England lacked the “underground caverns and deep cavities in which, according to philosophers, [earthquakes] are usually generated.”36 A large number of falling stars was particularly troubling again because it defied natural explanation. Since “no apparent reason for this can be found in the Book of Meteors [Aristotle’s Meteorology],” Matthew concluded that “Christ’s menace was threatening mankind.”37 Matthew thus implied that earthquakes and other phenomena arising from natural causes were noteworthy but not apocalyptic. But those for which no natural cause could be found pointed menacingly toward the end.

  Matthew Paris’s analysis of earthquakes and falling stars reflects the thirteenth-century scholastics’ ongoing project of explaining more and more events—and particularly mirabilia—through natural causes.38 Phenomena that appear as wonder-inducing signs in early medieval chronicles—like rains of fire—meet with scientific explanations, often highly dependent on astrological theories, in thirteenth-century authors such as Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, and Roger Bacon. One might conceivably use natural philosophy to investigate and explain most marvels and prodigies. The logical extension of this movement would be that even those phenomena associated with the Last Days in prophecies and Scripture could be explained scientifically,
with the assumption that God regularly can and does act through secondary causes.

  In fact, the bleeding edge (to borrow a computer term)39 of this project of naturalizing marvels was the attempt to apply scientific reasoning to the study of religion and, in particular, the apocalypse. The preferred mode of analysis for such an investigation was astrology. The thirteenth-century Franciscan Roger Bacon was the most outspoken advocate for the application of mathematics to eschatology. According to Bacon, astrology was particularly useful in looking to general changes on earth, such as changes in laws and sects, meaning that one could use the stars to predict such changes in religion as the arrival of Antichrist.40 Bacon used astrological theories to conclude that only one more major religious sect was to appear on earth in the future. That final sect had to be the lying, magical sect of Antichrist. Bacon was confident that further study of the stars would tell him when that sect would arrive, and in the Opus maius he offered this advice to Pope Clement IV: “I know that if the Church should be willing to consider the sacred text and prophecies . . . and should order a study of the paths of astronomy, it would gain some idea of greater certainty regarding the time of Antichrist.”41

  After the Parisian condemnations of 1277, however, in which a number of astrological propositions were condemned, few were willing to take up Bacon’s charge. Bishop Stephen Tempier’s list of condemned propositions contained several dealing with astrology. His caricature of the science of the stars associated it with the worst sort of condemned fatalism: an affront on human free will and God’s omnipotence.42 Probably as a result, several authors in Paris around the year 1300 in fact expressed skepticism about the ways in which astrology might be used to predict the time of Antichrist’s advent. Arnau de Vilanova, for example, was quite happy to use scriptural figures to set an exact date for Antichrist’s arrival: 1378. Nonetheless, he completely dismissed astrologers’ claims to be able to predict the time of the end, asserting, “Just as [God] acted supernaturally in the work of the world’s creation, so, too, he will accomplish the world’s consummation supernaturally.”43

  John of Paris, writing in response to Arnau’s treatise, flatly denied that humans could have certain knowledge of the time of Antichrist’s advent, whether using Scripture, prophecy, or astrology to calculate that time. John was willing, however, to use the movements of the stars to offer a conjecture of the world’s age. That figure, in turn, he fitted to prophecies about how long the world would endure in order to conjecture that the world would end in some two hundred years.44 All the same, John rejected the notion that astrology could generate a certain prediction of the time of Antichrist’s advent.

  Henry of Harclay, responding to both John’s and Arnau’s treatises, even more sharply attacked the claims that astrology—or any method of calculating—could predict the time of Antichrist’s arrival. Ridiculing a number of apocalyptic prognostications, Henry thundered that the predictions of astrologers and other calculators were “vanissimi.”45 And, concluding, he specifically stated that the apocalyptic signs of Mark 13: 24 (a darkening of the sun and moon) would be miraculous, and not natural eclipses.46

  The message of all three authors was that end times were not susceptible to any kind of natural explanations or predictions based thereon, precisely what Matthew Paris had argued in 1250. In the mid-fourteenth century, one of England’s most prominent astrologers would rush to proclaim that he had predicted the outbreak of plague and would spend pages using astrology to investigate the date of Creation, but he would shy away from any attempt to use astrology to predict the time of the end.47 But by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, astrological predictions of the world’s end were increasingly common. The plague writings of the mid-fourteenth century helped effect that change. They did so by presenting the plague ambiguously as both an apocalyptic sign and a natural event.

  Plague as Apocalyptic Sign in Fourteenth-Century Texts

  Indeed, earthquakes and other prodigies supported a sometimes open and sometimes implicit apocalyptic discourse in several fourteenth-century chronicles about the plague. By linking the plague and the portents surrounding it with other apocalyptic signs drawn from Revelation or the Gospels, or by quoting key prophecies and passages from Scripture, these chroniclers—usually writing in the immediate wake of the initial outbreak of plague—interpret the appearance of pestilence as one of several signs of the end.

  A number of authors associated the plague with known apocalyptic prophecies. For example, the Irish chronicler John Clynn, who apparently perished in the plague himself, inserted in his chronicle the widely circulated Cedar of Lebanon prophecy, now said to have been revealed in a vision to a Cistercian monk in Tripoli in 1347.48 Along with the now long-past falls of Tripoli and Acre, the prophecy foretold famines, great mortality, and other torments prior to a fifteen-year period of peace and then the final onslaught of Antichrist. Clynn followed up his quotation of the prophecy with the remark, “It is unheard of since the beginning of the world that so many men would have died in such a [short] time on earth, from pestilence, famine, or some other infirmity.” And he made specific reference to an earthquake “which extended for thousands of miles, [and] toppled, absorbed, and overthrew cities, villages, and towns” and to the [subsequent?] pestilence that deprived these settlements of any inhabitants.49 Thus, for Clynn, the earthquake was directly linked to the plague, and both numbered among the apocalyptic torments described in the Cedar of Lebanon prophecy.

  Within this context, perhaps, are to be understood other signs and portents Clynn listed in the years prior to 1348. For the year 1337, for example, he described flooding, freezing weather, a sheep and cattle murrain, and the unexpected appearance of roses on willow trees in England during Lent (which were taken to various locations and displayed as a spectacle).50 And for the year 1335, Clynn related that a large cross was erected in the square in Kilkenny, and many people had themselves branded with the sign of the cross (with a burning iron) as a sign of their pledge to go to the Holy Land. The Cedar of Lebanon prophecy Clynn would quote for 1348 predicted a “general passage by all the faithful” to the Holy Land following the times of tribulation. Looking back in 1348, those pledges too might be seen as a fulfillment of prophecy. The Cedar of Lebanon vision seems to have offered Clynn an overarching explanation for all the various signs he described. In pointing to a period of peace after torments, the prophecy could offer hope and comfort as well as provide meaning to the calamitous events.51

  Scripture itself provided a key for understanding plague’s apocalyptic meaning for other fourteenth-century authors. For example, John of Winterthur, a Swiss Franciscan, remarked upon an earthquake in the Austrian region of Carinthia that preceded the outbreak of the plague, as he traced the disease’s progress from “lands overseas” to Christendom (although without describing any marvelous portents such as a rain of fire in the east). “The aforesaid earthquake and pestilence,” he wrote, “are the evil harbingers of the final abyss and the tempest, according to the words of the Savior in the gospel: ‘There will be earthquakes in various places, and pestilence, and famines, etc.’ ” (Matt. 24: 7; Luke 21: 11).52 Another chronicler, William Dene, writing in the chronicle of the cathedral priory of Rochester, did not dwell on apocalyptic signs or portents before the plague. Nonetheless, as noted above, he specifically drew a line linking the demands imposed by now-scarce laborers after the plague to the work of Gog and Magog, God’s enemies in the Last Days (Rev. 20: 8).53 Chroniclers like John of Winterthur and William Dene described the events of the mid-fourteenth century as fulfilling the predictions of Scripture.

  Heinrich of Herford, one of the authors quoted at the outset of this essay, brought both Scripture and prophecy to bear upon his analysis of plague’s role as harbinger of apocalypse. In his chronicle, tracing the world’s history up to 1355, he, too, left several pointed indications that the plague and other current happenings were to be understood in apocalyptic terms. First, like John of Winterthur and William Dene, h
e cited scriptural passages that pointed to the Last Days. Immediately before he described the earthquake and rain of fire, serpents, toads that preceded the plague (in his entry for 1345), Heinrich lamented the sorry state of the world around him, a world full of “dissensions, rebellions, conspiracies, plots, and intrigues . . . among both secular and regular clergy”; “disturbances of young against old, ignoble against noble in many cities, monasteries, and congregations”; simony, to the extent that clerics traded appointments “for money, women, and sometimes for concubines” or gambled for them over dice; and many “disturbances and contests over kingdoms, principalities, archbishoprics, bishoprics, prebends, and other things of that kind.” To Heinrich, it looked as if things were turning out “just as the apostle foretold in 2 Timothy 3[: 1–7] and 2 Corinthians 12[: 20].”54 The references were apocalyptic. In 2 Corinthians 12: 20, Paul had written, “For I fear, lest, when I come, I shall not find you such as I would.” Promising that “in the last days perilous times shall come,” Paul had detailed in the overtly apocalyptic 2 Timothy 3 the selfishness, disobedience, dissensions, and lawlessness that would reign near the end. Even before he began to discuss the plague and the prodigies surrounding its appearance, Heinrich implied that current events pointed to just those “perilous times” of which the apostle had warned.