Last Things Read online

  The “liminality” of the departed soul implied that the soul underwent a period of waiting. This period of waiting might be cut short, even canceled, in a glorious manner in the case of the valde boni, the saints, who were instantly received into heaven. But it threatened to last for an indefinite period of time for the majority of the faithful, the non valde mali as Augustine had defined them. As Paxton has shown so well, the rituals that handled with reverence the “liminal” corpse as it lay among the living communicated a clear religious message that drew attention to the liminal status of the soul after death.

  What this useful term does not, of course, include was equally important to late antique and early medieval Christians. The departed soul stood before a God who was anything but liminal. God’s sovereign initiative as judge and as source of forgiveness had to be imagined. It was God who would decide how to bring to an end the painfully indecisive state of the average soul. At some time, it was hoped, he would invite the soul into the joy of his presence. That much was known. But in what ways and according to what morally convincing, current notions of justice and mercy on his part, and of amendment on the part of the sinner, could he be imagined as acting, both at the moment of death and, finally, for body and soul alike, on the Last Day?

  Forced to think about the unthinkable on this particular issue, Christians of the fifth and sixth centuries tended to fall back on the fixed components of their thought-world. They drew comfort from well-established imaginative structures. But they found that no one imaginative structure could do justice to the full extent of the problem. Each structure reflected significantly different areas of experience. As a result, what is usually presented as the emergence of a doctrine of purgatory in the Latin West may best be seen in terms of the inconclusive juxtaposition of two such structures. One structure placed the greater emphasis on the eventual purgation of the soul after death. The other stressed God’s exercise of his sovereign prerogative of mercy. At some time or other—most probably, it was thought, at the Last Day—God’s amnesty would wipe clean the slate of human sins, much as an emperor on earth was known to pardon criminals and remit arrears in taxes.

  Of these two traditions, the one associated with Augustine and Gregory the Great and the consequences that later ages would draw from their works stressed the purgation of sins by the individual sinner in this life and in the next. Spiritual growth was assumed to be a prolonged and painful process. For that reason alone, it almost certainly took more than a lifetime to become worthy of the presence of God. As Claude Carozzi has seen very clearly, Augustine found himself forced, by the logic of his commitment to the notion of purgation and his deep sense of the perpetual incompleteness of the human soul, to introduce an ambiguous wedge of “duration” into the timeless world of eternity: for him, the souls of the non valde mali in the next world were, as it were: “plongées dans une forme de durée.”19 A strongly rooted imaginative tradition gave a major place in this process of purgation to the operation of “fire” of some kind.20 Ever since the third century, Christians had appealed to the authority of Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, 3: 13, 15: “and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is . . . If any man’s work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: he himself shall be saved, yet so as by fire” (1 Cor. 3: 13, 15).

  For Clement of Alexandria and for Origen, this was a “wise fire,” “strong and capable of cleansing evil.”21 For Clement and Origen, and for many others, fire was a symbol not only of God’s ability to transform every level of his own creation, but also of the ability of repentant sinners to transform themselves.

  In such a view, the responsibility of the sinner for his or her own sins linked final forgiveness to personal transformation. Emphasis on the necessity for the “purgation” of the soul as the sine qua non of entry into the presence of God always looked back across the centuries to the long, austere labor on the self associated with the moral world of the classical philosopher. It is the last transformation, in Christian times, in the long history of the notion of le souci de soi, as we have learned to appreciate it from the works of Pierre Hadot and of the late Michel Foucault—that search for exacting, personal transformation that was the hallmark of the classical tradition of philosophical ethics.22 Even if, for Christian thinkers such as Augustine and Gregory the Great, the process of purification took place under the shadow of God’s mercy and depended on his grace at every stage, the center of gravity of the imaginative structure associated with the notion of purification rested heavily on the individual and on his or her ability to take on full responsibility for his or her own healing. In order that this slow process should reach completion, the Christian imagination must not allow itself to toy with the prospect of arbitrary action on the part of God. Forgiveness was always necessary, and forgiveness would come, but no sudden act of amnesty must be thought to be capable of intervening, as it were, to break the rhythm of the soul’s slow healing. It is in that aspect that the thought of Augustine and Gregory the Great betrays its deep, classical roots.

  That particular feature of the Christian notion of the purification of the Christian soul deserves special emphasis. It is a feature that was strangely homologous with previous thought. The moral world of the classical philosopher had always been characterized by a carefully maintained vacuum of power. Slow and authentic self-transformation, pursued without fear or favor, was the upper-class philosopher’s answer to the proximity of overwhelming power. The sage’s actions took place in pointed contrast to an ever-present alternative—the exercise of power by a ruler capable of wielding vast authority in a largely unconsidered manner. Unlike the sage, the ruler was as capable of reckless acts of generosity as he was of crushing severity. Neither were morally valid actions. Philosophers did not act in this manner, nor, ideally, did they depend on the good graces of those who did so.23

  Yet Christianity, like Judaism, had endowed God with just those attributes of infinite power, linked to the sovereign prerogative of mercy, which characterized “the kings of this world.”24 Clementia was an all-important imperial prerogative because the act of forgiveness was a stunning suspension on the part of a Roman emperor of an untrammeled power to harm.25 It was the same with God. The words of the Collect for the twelfth Sunday after Pentecost, in the Gelasian Sacramentary, “Deus, qui omnipotentiam tuam parcendo maxime et miserando manifestas,”26 appeal to a frankly “imperial” virtue in God. It was a virtue still appreciated by those Tudor and Stuart divines who incorporated the same Collect, without change, in the Book of Common Prayer: “O God, who declarest thy almighty power chiefly in showing mercy and pity.”27

  We should not underestimate the constant presence of imperial practice in the minds of late antique Christians, for late Roman practice helped them to frame the question of the forgiveness of unatoned sins beyond the grave. A solution that placed a heavy emphasis upon a relation to the self, favored by Christian moralists such as Augustine and Gregory the Great, was frequently eclipsed or at least inhibited by a solution posed in terms of relations with power. God’s supreme power assumed, on an imperial model, an uncircum-scribed reserve of mercy that overshadowed the strict implementation of his justice.

  When, for instance, monks and nuns in sixth-century Gaul gathered around the table on which the corpse of their recently deceased companion was laid out for washing, their prayers addressed a bruising paradox: at that very moment, two seemingly irreconcilable natures were being brought face to face—a human soul, released from the body and still “soiled” with the dirt of life in a sinful world, now drew close to the immense purity of God and his angels. Its first, most urgent need was for mercy. It was on the indulgentia of God, on his sovereign prerogative of amnesty as emperor of the living and the dead, that the prayers of the mourners placed their principal emphasis. What was asked for was an act of amnesty that came to the “soiled” soul as much from outside its own power to clean itself as did the act of the washing of the soiled, helpless corpse. In the words of the
Sacramentary of Gellone:

  et si de regione tibi contraria . . . contraxit . . . tua pietate ablue indulgendo . . . tu, Deus, inoleta bonitate clementer deleas, pietate indulgeas, oblivioni perpetuum tradas.

  And if this soul has contracted stains which come from this mortal region, so contrary to Your own. . . . May your Piety wash them away by showing Indulgence, may You, by the goodness rooted in your nature, annul it with Clemency, that you may remit its debts in an act of amnesty, that You may consign [those debts] to perpetual oblivion.28

  It is always difficult to translate Merovingian Latin such as that of the Sacramentary of Gellone. But we will not go far wrong if we render the sonorous phrases of such a prayer by doing full justice to their heavy “imperial” overtones. Modern students of the liturgy are attracted to le climat festif et pacifié, the “festive and peacefully resigned” tone of the ancient liturgies of the dead.29 Liturgists tend to contrast the tone of such liturgies with the morbid anxieties that characterized the liturgies of the middle ages and to wish for their reinstatement as more authentic early Christian witnesses to the mood appropriate to Christians in the face of death. What it is easy to forget is that these liturgies reflect not so much greater confidence in the love of God as a notion of the absolute power of God, rooted in the most formidably autocratic aspects of the late Roman imperial office. Late Roman Christians found it natural to pray to a God for whom the act of mercy was in itself a declaration of almighty power.

  What mattered to these Christians was that this was power that could be moved to mercy. A long-established model of the workings of royal power had set in place a mechanism by which pleas for mercy would be considered. The notion of absolute power and the consequent right to exercise amnesty deliberately left space for a third factor: the presence, near the ruler, of persons whose principal, most publicly acclaimed privilege was the right bestowed on them by the ruler to exercise parrésia, “freedom of speech,” to forward claims for forgiveness. Christ, in the first instance, was the supreme intercessor for the humanity that he had redeemed with his own blood. But Christ’s throne was flanked by created beings—the angels and the saints—whose prayers would be heard. They were authorized by him to plead on behalf of their sinful protégés. They were intercessors. Indeed, they were frankly recognized as patroni, “patrons,” sufficiently confident of enjoying his friendship to bring before him, with some hope of success, pleas for mercy on behalf of their many far from perfect clients.30

  Altogether, amnesty was in the air. When he came to write on the Last Judgment in the penultimate book of the City of God, Augustine found that he had to deal with a surprisingly wide variety of views on the amnesty of God, “which I have had experience of, expressed in conversations with me.”31 In holding up such views for criticism, Augustine was not reporting only the wishful thinking of woolly minded persons. He was touching the outlines of an imaginative structure endowed with exceptional long-term solidity. What he heard was that, at the Last Judgment, the power of the saints would prevail to obtain forgiveness for all but the worst sinners. For, so the argument went, if the saints had prayed for their persecutors when alive, how much more effective would their prayers be when they stood in the presence of God? At that time, their prayers would no longer be impeded by the frailty of their bodies, and their enemies would lie “prostrate before them, as humble suppliants.” What saint could resist such an occasion to show mercy?32 The amnesty granted by God in answer to the prayers of the saints on their great day of intercession would be wide. It would certainly cover all baptized Catholics who had partaken of the Eucharist and perhaps many others. As for hell itself, its eternity might also be disrupted by God’s amnesty. The purifying fire of which Paul had spoken was the fire of hell itself in which sinful Catholics would be immersed for a short time.33

  Augustine dismissed such views. But they were neither trivial nor isolated. Indeed, variants of such views, and not those of Augustine, were prevalent in the immediate future. Thus, in around 400, the poet Prudentius, who was himself a retired provincial governor, could take for granted when he wrote his Cathemerinon, his poem On the Daily Round, that every Easter, perhaps even every Sunday, was marked by a spell of remission of punishment for that “population of dark shades” who were confined in hell or (what amounted to much the same thing) in the hell-like prison of the netherworld, where they awaited definitive sentence at the Last Judgment.34 Such remission was only to be expected. It had worked its way deep into the language of amnesty in a Christian empire. Valentinian I could hardly be called the most gentle of emperors, yet he knew how to celebrate Easter in a manner worthy of his God. In the words of an edict preserved in the Theodosian Code: “On account of Easter, which we celebrate from the depths of our heart, We release from confinement all those persons who are bound by criminal charges and who are confined to prison.”35 In the yet more pious Ravenna of the emperor Honorius, prisoners would be released from jail every Sunday to be conducted to the local baths “under trustworthy guard,” subject to the supervision of the local bishop.36

  The issue of periodic respite from punishment in hell raised by Prudentius was in itself somewhat peripheral;37 it was simply a testing of the outer limits of a solidly established structure of expectations that would last until well into the late sixth century. Thus Gregory of Tours, who died in 594, still thought instinctively in terms of the grand drama of intercession and amnesty. Reticent about so many aspects of himself and his family, Gregory was at his most urgently autobiographical when he thought of himself on the Last Day:

  And when, at the Last Judgement, I am to be placed on the left hand, Martin will deign to pick me out from the middle of the goats with his sacred right hand. He will shelter me behind his back. And when, in accordance with the Judge’s sentence, I am to be condemned to the infernal flames, he will throw over me that sacred cloak, by which he once covered the King of Glory [by sharing it with Christ in the form of the beggar with whom he had divided his officer’s robe] and will gain a reprieve for me, as angels tell the King. . . . “This is the man for whom Saint Martin pleads.”38

  The world of Gregory of Tours was characterized by repeated, dramatic scenes of amnesty. In this respect, the Merovingian state of the sixth century had remained formidably late Roman. Its upper classes found themselves implicated, on a day-to-day basis, in the stark antitheses of justice and forgiveness, abject humiliation and protection that formed the ever-present background to the religious sensibility of Gregory himself. Faced by the King of Heaven, kings knew exactly how to behave. In 561, after a reign of fifteen years, the aging king Chlothar came to the shrine of Saint Martin at Tours: “in front of the tomb . . . he went over all the actions in which he had, perhaps, failed to do what was right. He prayed with much groaning that the blessed confessor should beseech the mercy of the Lord, so that, through Martin’s intervention on his behalf, God might cancel the account of those things which he had done wrongly.”39

  The potentes of the kingdom were expected to behave in the same manner before their king. Guntram Boso, for instance, was a notoriously tricky member of the newly formed elite of Austrasia. But he was also sufficiently close to the Catholic piety of Gregory to allow himself on one occasion to be persuaded by a soothsayer that he would be Gregory’s successor as bishop of Tours.40 When he fell out of favor with Brunhild, the queen mother, he knew what he should do: “He began to go around the bishops and courtiers. . . . He then pinned his hopes on gaining pardon through bishop Agerich of Verdun, who was god-father to the king . . . stripped of his arms and in fetters, he was brought into the King’s presence by the bishop. . . . Falling at the king’s feet, he said: Peccavi ‘I have sinned.’ The king ordered him to be raised from the ground and placed him in the hands of the bishop: ‘Holy bishop, he is yours.’ ”41 And so, once again, Guntram Boso wriggled free. A loyal devotee of Saint Martin,42 despite his weakness for soothsayers, one suspects that he thought that he might yet do the same on the Last Day.


  Gregory wrote as he did because he considered that his contemporaries had become complacent. They had allowed the prospect of the Last Day to slip from their minds. Gregory’s careful calculations of time and detailed record of the signs of growing disorder around him were meant to warn those who, unlike himself, were inclined “to expect no longer the approach of the end of the world”—qui adpropinquantem finem mundi disperant—and who lived confidently sinful lives as a result.43 As for Gregory, the throne of Christ at the Last Day and the desperate appeals for amnesty that would be offered to it at that time were a looming presence, rendered perpetually actual to him in his own world by so many sharp, small scenes of patronage, protection, and amnesty.

  In other areas of Christian Europe, however, the throne of Christ was not invested with the same heavy associations of sovereign mercy as came naturally to Gregory, as he wrote in the recognizably late Roman society of southern Gaul. In Ireland, in the early 630s, Abbot Fursey fell ill when on a visit to his kin. He experienced a series of visions of the other world that constitute the first continuous narrative of the journey of the soul in the other world in the Latin literature of the middle ages.44 What is revealing about Fursey’s visions is that in these visions the throne of Christ was infinitely distant and that, although God’s incalculable reserve of mercy was asserted by the angels who protected Fursey, it was asserted in a manner that implied that such a view did not come naturally.45 It needed to be defended against more commonsensical views of the working of God’s justice.