Last Things Read online

  The essays in Part III treat in detail some very famous texts and objects and thereby raise large questions about ways of imagining “last things” between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries. Anna Harrison gives an interpretation of Bernard of Clairvaux’s sermons for All Saints, some of his most studied sermons. Harvey Stahl relates a gorgeous full-page miniature from a late thirteenth-century Book of Hours to contemporary reliquaries and thus casts light on one of the most important paintings of the Middle Ages, Hubert and Jan van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece of 1432. Claudia Rattazzi Papka poses in a new way the issue of voice in two of the most famous texts of the fourteenth century, Dante’s Commedia and William Langland’s Piers Plowman.

  Anna Harrison’s essay addresses heaven—a goal that lies beyond earth and time, yet can tantalize the yearning soul in this life with a foretaste of blessedness. She argues that Bernard of Clairvaux’s heaven is less a community of saints than an individual experience of beatitude, however important community may be as the backdrop against which spiritual growth through suffering and sympathy occurs. Harrison’s Bernard is indeed the chimera he understood himself to be; the paradoxes she finds in his view of heaven encapsulate several of the paradoxes of high-medieval eschatology. Harrison shows us a departed soul already tasting union but needing body for final ecstasy. Bernard’s heaven, as she interprets it, is one in which consummation both does and does not come at personal death; it is a realm in which the monastic community both is and is not integral, a goal beyond time in which nonetheless we find that which is essential to time—change, development, the growth of desire.

  Using late medieval art, Harvey Stahl gives a description and interpretation of heaven quite similar to Harrison’s. The afterlife he finds depicted in an early fourteenth-century Book of Hours is a heaven, a heavenly church, and a place of beatific vision available to the faithful (as is Bernard’s heaven) before the end of time. Situating this place of blessedness in the context both of Triumph of the Virgin iconography and of reliquaries, Stahl shows how problematic and powerful is the painted embodiedness of the blessed. The fact that both the Book of Hours miniature and the monumental Ghent altarpiece are presented in a reliquary-like frame calls attention to the bodies of the blessed, as do the complex iconographic connections in the miniature to the Bodily Assumption of the Virgin. Yet this heaven, like Bernard’s, is no longer clearly located after Apocalypse or Judgment. The blessed place Stahl explores is a heaven outside time, available now—one in which the soul is already body-shaped (somatomorphic).29 Such depictions of heaven as a place for somatomorphic selves before resurrection and judgment are perhaps the context for understanding the sensibility Clifford Backman sees in Arnau de Vilanova, a sensibility in which intense materialist curiosity nevertheless avoids locating and probing too specifically the eschatological body.

  Claudia Rattazzi Papka’s essay is infused with a sense of eschatological paradox similar to the paradox Harrison finds in Bernard. Papka treats the Divine Comedy and Piers Plowman as what she calls “fictions of judgment”—that is, narratives that simultaneously claim access to a transcendent perspective on history and assert their contingent status as human, “made” artifacts (fictiones). Through attention specifically to apocalyptic moments in the two poems (moments that claim to announce “last things”) and to moments of self-referentiality (moments when the authors reflect on the limits of their knowledge and expression), Papka shows that Dante claims a transcendent voice, transgressing human limits, while Langland’s reluctance to make such claims may be related to the much discussed indeterminacy characteristic of his poem. Papka suggests that the contrast between Langland and Dante represents a general turning in the fourteenth century from poetry confident enough to speak the (of course self-consciously constructed) voice of the eschaton to a more situated, hesitant, and partial apocalyptic voice. Her readings help us to see that all eschatological texts reflect in some way their status as fictions; hence all must assert, whether consciously or not, their own nature as mediating and contingent, as paradoxical claims to speak in the now of what is beyond time and speech.

  The Year 2000

  This volume considers the various manifestations of medieval eschatological thinking and so is not directly concerned with possible parallels with contemporary concerns. Some such reflection is unavoidable, nevertheless, in view of the arrival of the year 2000 and the widely credited truism that we live in apocalyptic times. In fact the investigation of medieval ideas of last things shows just how little our era dwells on apocalyptic apprehensions in any meaningful way. It is our contention that the late twentieth century is not apocalyptic, although it may be eschatological in the broad sense we have tried to emphasize here. The year 2000 is an event surrounded by a largely artificially generated excitement and will almost certainly be thrown onto the already massive dust heap of popular culture once it has enjoyed its brief place in the public imagination, to join channeling, oat bran, and the Spice Girls. Its one semi-serious aspect, the threatened “Y2K” computer failure, in fact exemplifies the evanescent quality of the event. Few people expect computer code problems to bring about an end to the world as we know it. Discussion becomes animated only regarding the costs of fixing it or the possible unintended but temporary consequences of missing some needed repairs. It is a faux apocalypse and, insofar as it marks any sort of threat, a massively secular one.

  Those who really do believe in an imminent apocalypse, like the Branch Davidians or the enthusiasts for comets, are hard to take seriously except in terms of the havoc they, or their suppression, have wreaked. While perhaps more violent than some of their predecessors, they are part of a long chain of apocalyptic hopes that have characterized the fringes of American religious and pseudo-scientific enthusiasm since the nineteenth century and will outlast the turn of the millennium.

  The present moment is, if anything, characterized by a waning of apocalyptic expectations of both a final conflagration and the arrival of a just society. The underlying assumptions, certainly of most Americans, that things will go on pretty much as they are now except with some newer and slicker technology contrasts dramatically with the real apprehensiveness of the mid-twentieth century or with the more sweeping confidence of Bellamy’s Looking Backward and other futurologists at the turn of the last century.30 The danger of some sort of nuclear war is probably greater now than in the 1950s, given the proliferation of weapons and the decentralization of political power in the world, but this threat lacks the immediacy and coherence of Soviet-American confrontations of yore. Nothing remotely approaching the mid-century atmosphere of dread and brinkmanship now exists. Recent pseudo-apocalyptic movies like Armageddon or Deep Impact end happily with a return to normalcy as opposed to genuinely pessimistic end-of-the-world productions of decades past such as On the Beach or Fail Safe.

  Expectation of a favorable revolutionary transformation of society flourished during much of the twentieth century but died by its close. That change takes place and accelerates is undeniable, but it is no longer widely believed that principles of scientific socialism, or of eugenics, or behaviorism need only be applied to create a utopian order. Nor is it widely believed as was the case a hundred years ago that public life and democracy will expand, that the citizenry will become wiser, or that workers will have a larger share in the management of enterprise. If the “free market” serves as a commonly held current nostrum, its promise is of an expansion very much resembling what already exists.

  Where there may be some similarities between the medieval and the contemporary is in terms of eschatology more broadly defined. Many recent manifestations of popular culture express an anxiety over the instability of bodily identity resulting from such things as genetic manipulation, organ transplants, or cloning. Recent examples of the theme of survival in a body transplant and the identity problems engendered by such a form of survival include Lawrence Steinberg, Memories of Amnesia, Nancy Weber, Broken-Hearted, and Laurel Doud, This Body.”31

 
; Popular culture in recent years has also been particularly obsessed with dying, near-death experience, and survival after death. Elizabeth Kübler-Ross pioneered analysis of dying as a progressive experience in work that after three decades remains very influential.32 In 1994 Frank J. Tipler attempted to give a proof from modern science of the resurrection of the dead at the end of time, a book that received wide (if temporary) attention.33

  More significantly for our purposes, death, heaven, and ghosts are now regarded as ways of assessing the significance of a life in a manner seemingly reminiscent of late medieval memento mori literature. Toni Morrison’s Beloved is among the most impressive examples of use of the theme of supernatural survival to explore the significance of individual life.34 A number of films such as Ghost, Heaven Can Wait, or Truly, Madly, Deeply concern attempts to influence or remake mortal life after death with comic or pathetic effect.35 The spate of recent illness memoirs may be simply part of the irresistible, cloying spread of the therapeutic, but it also evokes the medieval idea that a “good death” serves as an emblem of how one has lived.

  Here, too, however, as with apocalyptic scenarios, the contemporary take on the eschatological is more sunny than its superficial resemblance to the Middle Ages at first suggests. We imagine death, near-death, or otherworldly journeys, even ghosts, in terms of sweetness and the realization of an essentially good self. Medieval journeys to the other side by and large dwelled more on hell than on heaven. The return of the deceased was not usually very reassuring.36 We are inclined to congratulate ourselves for facing (or at least talking about) death more frankly than was the case twenty or thirty years ago, but our approaches remain somewhat confused and blandly optimistic.37 Current preoccupations with dying, near-death experience, or the supernatural are much less shaped and coherent than was the case in an era with a greater everyday familiarity with death and a universally shared doctrine of survival after death. Nonetheless, as the revival of interest in angels demonstrates, our era can’t help but mimic and appropriate language and imagery from the Middle Ages even if rendered in an eclectic and doctrineless fashion.

  We do feel unease before a future that seems likely to include terrible environmental destruction, the proliferation of world systems that control by mindless technology, a degradation of sensibility, literacy, and attention span, perhaps even that effacement of the human signalled by Heidegger. These are, however, not as vivid or immediate as apprehension of the arrival of Antichrist, or the joining of earthly events with a theologically worked out divine order, or the once dreaded World War III. At the end of the twentieth century we are neither very apocalyptic, nor very eschatological, nor even very scared. Not, perhaps, as much as we ought to be.

  PART I

  THE SIGNIFICANCE OF DYING AND THE AFTERLIFE

  Settling Scores

  Eschatology in the Church of the Martyrs

  Carole Straw

  Beneath the Altar, the souls of the martyrs1 cried indignantly for vengeance.2 In the “terrible tribunal of [the] savior and master,”3 persecutors would find “no mercy” from God’s exacting justice.4 From a black abyss, a sulfurous fire blazed ingeniously: it could burn forever, but never consume its victims.5 The tables would be turned and insults would recoil upon the perpetrators. Martyrs would become triumphant victors, judging the very ones who had pronounced such brutal sentences upon them.6 Polycarp shook his fist, “Get out of here, godless heathens!”7 Tied to the stake, he warned, “You threaten me with a temporary fire that is soon extinguished. But you don’t know about the judgment that is to come, and the everlasting fire that awaits unbelievers.”8 Perpetua’s friends lectured the mob, “stressing the joy they [had] in their suffering,” and “warn[ing] them of God’s judgment.” “You’ve got us, but God will get you!”9

  The martyrs would have their satisfaction; scores would be settled. The martyrs’ heroic endurance and the perfected life of their resurrection would prove beyond question the doctrine for which they had surrendered their lives. God’s wrath would vindicate Christians and confound the obstinate pagans.10 Apocalyptic judgment was “the prayer of Christians,” Tertullian proclaimed. “This will bring shame to nonbelievers; this will bring joy to the angels.”11

  This unsparing world of the martyrs was founded on a strict sense of justice as exact requital, a lex talionis, for the Christian universe was governed by reciprocal exchanges designed to achieve balance and equilibrium. For Christians, the Apocalypse would be that critical moment of resolution when good would be rewarded and evil punished. Only after that final reckoning would equity, justice, and harmony prevail, when accounts had been settled and each rendered his due. These conceptions of reciprocity and retribution lay at the heart of the distinctive apocalyptic mentality that characterized the church of the martyrs in this true “age of anxiety” (c. 100–313).12

  Simply to be of this church was to share this apocalyptic mentality. Writers were militant and demanding, impatient of ambiguity and complexity, and wedded to absolutes. Reflection and introspection gave way to instinctive, visceral responses. Revelation and subjective conviction replaced discursive reasoning; violence often succeeded persuasion. The concrete and material prevailed over the abstract and immaterial: heaven and hell, the soul and body of the afterlife were elaborated in terms easily understood by analogy with realities known. People, motivations, and actions tended to be reduced to moralistic types: monster and martyr, cruelty and altruism, tragedy and triumph. So, too, polarities of spirit and flesh were fastidiously antithetical, never approaching harmony and reconciliation. The universe was divided and embittered: the ancient mentality of the vendetta overwhelmed more subtle ideas of justice and moral reform. Extremism, a lack of subtlety, willful disregard of vital distinctions, a tendency to cast events in the worst light possible—all characterized this aggressively defensive style of thought. This apocalyptic mentality was the child (for good or evil) of an agonistic, contest culture.13

  From a long historical perspective, this mentality is extremely significant. Apocalypticism translated into martyrdom, for it demanded of Christians a willingness to die for Christ at Armageddon. The martyr would remain the supreme ideal, even though later, less literal translations would include monks, crusaders, missionaries, and less august exemplars of self-abnegation. Second, the status of the Christians as a persecuted elect worked to shape the church into a resilient, rigorous, and potentially expansive institution of social and ideological change. Here passivity was transformed into activity: the martyr became the monk, and also the bishop; and even the average Christian, whose sacrificial patience made him a stalwart and obedient member of the body of Christ.14

  This world without quarter fostered a severe eschatology, for the bitter tensions between Christians and nonbelievers evoked ever more acrimonious and alarming predictions. Eschatology was central to, and inseparable from, the larger political aims of winning credibility and respectability for Christians.15 Growth of the community seemed impossible without this safety; yet ironically the community flourished the more from the lack of it.16 But how did one prove the truth of Christianity to win a secure place in society? Early apologists (e.g., Justin, Tatian, Athenagoras, Minucius Felix) had sought toleration and focused on a distant Parousia as the “truth test” to earn credibility and justify accommodation for the new sect.17

  As tensions and persecutions grew more fierce, however, emphases shifted. Capitalizing on their rejection, Christians defined themselves more assertively in opposition to their enemies, be they pagans, Jews, Docetists, or other heretics—and this to their advantage. The “truth test” became martyrdom itself; the apocalypse was now. The martyr was the “witness” who testified to the truth; more than that, martyrs came to prove the truth actively, for the truth they proved was embodied in the suffering itself, and so was self-evident: tautologous and autogenous. This is how and why the word evolved in meaning from “witness” to “one who suffers for a cause.”18

  Through the agon the t
rial or ordeal of suffering, martyrs were demonstrating truths, for truth was “real” in being experiential and tangible. If any should be like doubting Thomas, the “evidence of the eyes” was not wanting in “the wounds of God’s servants,” in the “glory of their scars.”19 Fellow bishops wrote to Cyprian: “What is more glorious . . . than to have proved the truth in public testimony; than by dying, to conquer death which is feared by all?”20 No scientific method, no canons of evidence existed to discover the truth or elucidate its content. Authority acted, standing behind the beliefs it promoted.

  In this late antique world, the agon proved the worth of someone by the audience’s judgment of his public performance, thus affirming or disputing that witness’s testimony. Knowledge was gained by challenges, contrasts, and revelation; trust in itself was not trustworthy: it needed to be tested and tried. “For how can a general prove the valor of his soldiers unless they have an enemy?” Lactantius asked. And since God himself could not be opposed, he instigated adversaries to prove the fidelity and devotion of his servants.21“How great was the proof of faith” (emphasis added) the Maccabees supplied with their confession and martyrdom in their ordeal, Cyprian praised.22 Action was proof; seeing was believing.

  The agon proved truth because it was trial and judgment affording choices and alternative results. Martyrdom was a “crisis” a time for decision and judgment, like Christ’s resolution to align his will with the Father’s and accept the cup of his suffering in Gethsemane (Mark 14: 36; Matt. 26: 39; Luke 22: 42).23 Christians therefore had to choose one way or the other, lest confusion prevail when seeking “to serve two masters” (Matt. 6: 24). Confusion meant uncertainty, instability, and suspicion: the deceitful works of the devil. God, on the other hand, represented clarity, order, constancy, and certainty: truth. Of confession and denial Tertullian wrote: “For where one is, both are. For contraries always go together.”24 Unless put to the test, this mysterious muddle could not be sorted out; the winner would not emerge, truth would not be verified. In the end, truth was what (or who) emerged as victor from the agon. This was an ambitious age of fluid authority, where charismatic personalities and impressive actions validated beliefs. A later world would receive truths codified by authorities representing a well-established hierarchy. But the martyrs broached a frontier of auspicious possibilities.