Last Things
Page 26
First, nature was not a category separable from theology. “Caeli ennarrant gloriam dei” (The heavens proclaim the glory of God; Ps. 18: 2). For medieval Christians, the world was God’s handiwork, and any effort to understand the world—such as natural philosophy—came square up against the fact that nature was the fabric of God’s plan. That meant that the earth was never just the earth, but that even for a naturalizing author such as Roger Bacon the world was also the orb of the mappaemundi, the area in which God’s plan of salvation unfolded, sometimes literally—as in the Ebstorff map—the body of Christ. Any time one mapped events on the earth, one was fitting them into a geography and a chronology put in place by the Creator. Place, time, and event all had eschatological meaning. The sorts of slippages in meaning and free associations I have been detailing here were the logical outgrowth of this cosmology. Once an author began to map a phenomenon like the plague onto that orb, he was entangled in an endless string of associations and cross-references. If plague began in the east and moved toward the west, one could not help but think of both Prester John and Gog and Magog, of the potential Christians and the feared enemies of end times. If the plague was accompanied by earthquakes, one’s mind was drawn to both Matthew 24 and Galenic medicine. One could follow a trail of snakes and worms that led from apocalyptic portents to meteorology to medicine and finally to the geography of Gog and Magog.
It is not surprising that the same cluster of phenomena appear in monastic chronicles and medical discussions of the plague. An event like plague could not be understood entirely apart from God. Once an author began to describe plague with the language of natural philosophy, miasma-generating earthquakes inevitably shaded into apocalyptic earthquakes, and corrupt vapors inside the earth began to look like corrupt enemies within Christendom. Existing eschatology shaped and informed the map on which fourteenth-century Christians plotted the epidemic’s course. While mapping can indeed represent the act of possession, of physically and intellectually grasping space, mapping the fourteenth-century Black Death rather inserted it into an orb already freighted with meaning, where earthquakes, plague, frogs, and hail hovered in a polysemic limbo between physical undoing and apocalyptic unveiling.
Second, the ambiguity of the portents in the fourteenth-century plague treatises must be seen additionally as a species of caution in predicting the time of the end, whether reading portents or using astrology or some other branch of natural philosophy to do so. By leaving open the question of whether this plague and these earthquakes were a sign of end times or simply a manifestation of a bad run of weather, fourteenth-century authors could hedge their bets. Heinrich of Herford softens his quotations from 2 Timothy, 2 Corinthians, and the Cedar of Lebanon vision by offering a horoscope explaining how the action of the heavens could engender the appearance of “the race without a head.” Flagellants now appear as sufferers of a form of mania and perhaps not as the harbingers of Antichrist. John Clynn reproduces the apocalyptic Cedar of Lebanon vision, yet leaves blank pages at the end of his chronicle “for the continuation of this work, if perhaps in the future any human witness should remain, or any member of the human race.”123 The Paris doctors mention falling stars, thunder, lightning, earthquakes, and frogs, yet set these apocalyptic emblems within a clearly scientific context. These multivalent signs allowed fourteenth-century authors safely to predict and not predict the end at the same time.
This reluctance to come down firmly on one side or the other is apparent in the plague writings discussed above, texts that hover between natural and apocalyptic explanations of the plague. The Paris physicians, for example, end their discussion of the plague’s astrological and earthly causes with the remark that epidemics sometimes proceed from God’s will.124 The author of the quaestio on earthquakes suggests in his introductory question that there is an either/or opposition between a divine cause of the plague and a natural one. At the end of the quaestio, however, he collapses that distinction, noting that God can as easily lift a naturally caused plague as he can one proceeding from supernatural causes.125 The portents mentioned by chroniclers like Heinrich of Herford meet in the same chronicle sometimes with an apocalyptic interpretation and sometimes with one drawn from natural philosophy. And in the chronicle of Neuberg monastery, apocalyptic-sounding fire falling from heaven, a rain of snakes and worms, and the changing of men into stones are all explained as resulting from “a malign impression of the superior bodies acting as efficient cause.”126
In their very caution, however, the authors of these plague treatises played a pivotal role in allowing a rehabilitation of the thirteenth-century attempts to naturalize the apocalypse. Unwilling to call the plague definitely either an apocalyptic sign or a natural event, mid-fourteenth-century authors simply had it both ways. In so doing, they collapsed the post-1277 distinction that insisted—as had John of Paris, Arnau de Vilanova, and Henry of Harclay—that the apocalypse would be a supernatural event and therefore could not be predicted by natural philosophy or astrology. The unspoken implication in plague writings is that there are scientific explanations behind the portents associated with the apocalypse and that, insofar as it is possible, God will work through natural causes in the destruction of the world. Thus one might indeed use natural philosophy to investigate the apocalypse. The very hesitancy of fourteenth-century plague authors to announce the end thus opened the door to renewed speculation about the apocalypse using natural philosophy.
By the early fifteenth century, the latest apocalyptic-seeming disaster, the Great Schism, had engendered just such an analysis. Spurred on by a reading of Roger Bacon, the French cardinal Pierre d’Ailly began cautiously using astrology to investigate the time of the end. Before he made his predictions, d’Ailly offered a careful defense of astrology and its ability to predict religious change. His defense hit at the very issues raised by Parisian authors around 1300 like John of Paris, namely, the extent to which the appearance of Antichrist would arise from natural or supernatural causes. D’Ailly’s conclusion, following Bacon, was that all religions save Christianity and Judaism were under the control of the stars. Even those two faiths, inasmuch as they had natural components, were subject to astrological control (the stars, for example, could explain Jesus’ excellent physical complexio). D’Ailly’s subtle distinction of the realms of natural and supernatural causality meant that the other religions, such as the anticipated sect of Antichrist, would fall under the heavens’ sway. Using that justification and cautiously hedging his calculations by nodding to the will of God, d’Ailly offered an astrological prediction of Antichrist’s advent for the year 1789.127
A generation later, in 1444, an astrologer named Jean de Bruges was even more confidently applying astrological reasoning to the study of the apocalypse.128 Relying heavily on the example set by Pierre d’Ailly, Jean based his prediction of the end on the pattern of conjunctions made by the planets Saturn and Jupiter. He paid particular attention to the triplicity, or group of zodiacal signs, in which each conjunction occurred. (Astrologers divided the zodiac into four triplicities, each of which was held to share the characteristics of one of the four elements: earth, water, air, and fire. Successive conjunctions of the two planets tend to stay within the same triplicity for around 240 years.)129 According to Jean, the world’s end would have to take place when Saturn-Jupiter conjunctions entered the fiery triplicity around the year 1765. Just as a conjunction in one of the watery signs had signaled the Flood, the future return to the fiery triplicity would have to bring about the world’s end in a deluge of fire. In his prognostication, then, Jean did not simply use the stars to predict the time of the world’s end. He also specifically provided an astrological explanation of the phenomena that would bring about that consummation, namely the rain of fire of Revelation 20: 9.130 More sure in his predictions than Pierre d’Ailly, Jean unabashedly described the apocalypse in natural terms. He was no outlier. By the early sixteenth century, such predictions were abundant.131
In this context of r
enewed natural speculation about the apocalypse, we can perhaps begin to understand the zeal that drove Christopher Columbus on his famous voyages across the Atlantic. As Pauline Moffit Watts has demonstrated, Columbus acted under a clear sense that the world’s end was at hand and that his own travels marked the beginning of the universal missionizing and conversion of the final days. Heir to speculations reopened in the wake of the plague, he derived his date for the apocalypse from a reading of Pierre d’Ailly’s writings on astrology. But, again like the authors of the fourteenth-century plague treatises, Columbus also was aware of the geography of the apocalypse and its motion from periphery to center. His ultimate goal thus was not simply to reach the east by sailing west, or even to bring about the conversion of the Indies, but rather to see a crusade to Jerusalem, where history would reach its culmination. In a letter urging Ferdinand and Isabella to undertake just such a crusade, Columbus cited d’Ailly as his source for the prediction that the world would not endure beyond one hundred and fifty-five more years—and divine inspiration for his confidence that the crusade would succeed.132
In the decades following the Parisian condemnations of 1277, it was not at all clear that such astrological prediction of the apocalypse would survive. Authors like Arnau de Vilanova, John of Paris, and Henry of Harclay around 1300 had asserted—as Matthew Paris had implied in 1250—that the world’s end would not be accomplished through natural causes and therefore could not be forecast using natural philosophy. Roger Bacon’s confident prediction that mathematical sciences would help the church foreknow the time of Antichrist lay unfulfilled. But by the fifteenth century, scholars again began to use the science of the stars to examine the world’s end, cautiously at first, then with more alacrity. In between those two moments, the plague writings of the mid-fourteenth century played a pivotal role. On the one hand, fourteenth-century authors clearly set the outbreak of pestilence in an apocalyptic frame of interpretation, mapping plague’s progress in a course that paralleled the eschatological geography of the mappaemundi and highlighting the disease’s outbreak with apocalyptic signs like earthquakes, hail, frogs, and rains of fire. On the other hand, the same authors offered an interpretation of plague—and the marvelous phenomena surrounding its appearance—as a completely natural phenomenon.
Unwilling definitively to announce that the world was about to end, fourteenth-century authors allowed their presentations to hover between dubbing the disease purely apocalyptic or purely natural. In their indecisive ambiguity, they refused to set the problem in the terms defined at century’s beginning, in which the apocalypse was to have nothing whatsoever to do with natural causes. In so doing, they left open the possibility that events might in fact be seen simultaneously as apocalyptic and resulting from natural causes, precisely the situation Roger Bacon had so confidently envisioned in the Opus maius. Doubtless these authors were terrified and sought to understand the overwhelming disaster around them in any and every way possible, even in ways deemed to be incompatible. In their very human reactions to plague, these writers reopened the door to naturalizing the apocalypse.
PART III
THE ESCHATOLOGICAL IMAGINATION
Community Among the Saintly Dead
Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermons for the Feast of All Saints
Anna Harrison
Bernard is Famed for the friendships he enjoyed. He pours out, in his sermons on saints as in his sermons on the Song of Songs, ardent expressions of longing and love for his brother and for other friends, living and dead, and one can find such expressions in his letters as well. A hunger to be remembered by his now dead brother infuses his lamentation on Gerard: “How I long to know what you think about me, once so uniquely yours,” Bernard writes. “Perhaps you still give thought to our miseries, now that you have plunged into the abyss of light, become engulfed in that sea of endless happiness.”1 For these reasons alone—that is, because of the tight hold that friendship exerts on him and because of his longing to be remembered by his brother—one might expect to discover in Bernard’s writings signs of this-life-like relationships among the saintly dead. Moreover, Bernard’s various works are shot through with references to the common life and to relationship with others more generally. In this essay, I consider Bernard’s sense of the relationship among heaven’s inhabitants. I focus on his five Sermons for the Feast of All Saints,2 and I look closely at the two images that are central to his discussion of the experience of saintly souls in heaven: the image of the bed and the image of the feast. My analysis of these images within the larger context of Bernard’s work indicates that despite his charged preoccupation with his brother’s love for him, despite his broader interest in friends and friendship, despite his attention to the common life and to the relationship between self and other, Bernard thinks little about interaction when he thinks about the dead.
Although the love that was alive on earth continues to move in heaven, it does change. Addressing his dead brother, Bernard exclaims:
God is love [1 John 4: 8], and the deeper one’s union with God, the more full one is of love. . . . Therefore. . . . Your love has not been diminished but only changed. . . . All that smacks of weakness you have cast away.3
The image of the heavenly feast is evocative of such change. More specifically, Bernard uses that image to talk about the dissolution of the will of each soul into the will of God; and through this image he conveys, too, a sense—however tentative and ambiguous—of the union of all souls in heaven. Bernard uses the image of souls resting on separate beds to talk about the maintenance, in heaven, of the self each soul was on earth, as well as the soul’s passionate, gratifying encounter with God.4 Neither of these images nor any other, however, communicates a sense of relationship among the saintly dead that resembles relationships forged in this life.
Community Among the Saintly Dead
Bernard tells us something about the earthly life of saints in his Second Sermon for the Feast of All Saints. Paul is the only saint Bernard mentions by name in this sermon. A “zealous and most fearless warrior,” Paul has heeded the “blast of the war trumpet”; Paul’s words are those of “a vigorous leader striving boldly.”5 The life of a soldier-saint is, “from the womb to the tomb,”6 a series of menacing skirmishes. It is characterized by the laborious business of striving toward salvation and by perpetual insecurity, as the saints are tossed between the hope that they will triumph in their battle and secure a place in heaven, on the one hand, and on the other, the fear that they will not stay the course but will succumb to temptation and tumble back into sin. The Sermon on the Mount is the saint’s battle plan, and victory consists in fulfilling the “law of the combat,”7 which is enjoined by the Beatitudes.8.
Because of the arduousness of the combat and the terrible and continual uncertainty of the outcome of the conflicts, the soldier-saint can never relax his vigilance. The anxious motion of a successful battle is rewarded in heaven by rest (and appears all the more frenzied in comparison with that rest). In Bernard’s description of heaven, images of rest predominate. Bernard’s preferred expression in describing the further reaches of contemplation enjoyed in this life is quies,9 and requies and somnus are the words that he uses to describe the state of saved souls, who are “delivered at last and for ever from all that could trouble their peace.”10 The saints now enjoy the rest that they sought while on earth, when they were caught between their longing for rest and the demands of charitable obedience (to their superior, to their Rule, to their God).11 Slumbering on their beds, the saints are no longer torn between tranquility and labor; they are no longer buffeted between hope and fear:
For this most sweet bed-covering of the soul, she now washes or moistens with no tears, since God has wiped every tear from her eyes. . . . This is, I say, a most sweet and most health-giving rest for the soul, a clean, secure, undisturbed conscience. Therefore, let the purity of her conscience be the soul’s pillow, tranquility its headrest, serenity its cover, so that she may sleep in the meantim
e [until the resurrection] deliciously in the bedcover and rest [there] happily.12
Bernard paints a deliciously languid picture of souls, who, finally free from the burden of self and others, sleep a wakeful sleep, flooded with untroubled memories; taking great delight in their storehouse of memories, that which was a source of anguish in life is now a source of joy:
[The souls of saints] are inwardly free from all trouble, in the sweetness of their soul, they recollect their years, they rejoice for the days in which they were humbled, with delighted admiration they consider the dangers that they have evaded, the labors that they have carried out, the battles that they have won.13
In that “city of rest,”14 the souls of the saints possess in their hearts great joy indeed. And yet, souls do not experience full joy: they are waiting for all who will be saved to fill up heaven, and they are waiting and longing for their glorified bodies so that they may consummate their bliss. What Bernard emphasizes is their longing for their bodies. For the souls’ desire for their bodies is such that their love for God “suffers a kind of contortion and makes a ‘wrinkle’ [Eph. 5: 27].”15 Only after the resurrection will this distracting desire for the body cease.16 Luxuriating on the bed of their conscience, mulling over their memories, and awaiting expectantly the return of their bodies, the souls of the saints appear self-preoccupied. But if we look at some of Bernard’s other writings, it becomes clear that the bed on which each soul rests is also the site of the soul’s passionate desire for God and intimate, pleasure-filled, encounter with God.17 The bed is the soul, and the soul is the bedroom of the King.18 The image of souls sleeping, remembering, and waiting, the stark separateness of each of the beds in which each soul enjoys God and desires God19 does not suggest interaction among the saints. There is scant indication that heaven’s inhabitants are even aware of one another.20