When he arrived in Continental Europe, Columbanus remained very much the sapiens. He never lacked for books. He soon received a copy of Gregory’s Regula Pastoralis, perhaps as a gift from the pope himself. He wrote to Gregory that it was a book “sweeter than honey to the needy.”1 But, despite his reverence, Rome remained a distant city to him. The frontier between the territories of the East Roman empire in Italy and the “barbarian” world to their north was, perhaps, the most clearly drawn line on his map of Europe. He kept to the “barbarian” side of this line, seeking out marginal zones in which to settle his colony of “strangers.” From 590 to 610, he was at Luxeuil, in the Vosges, in eastern France. Later, he passed along the Rhine and across the Alps to Bobbio. The site of Bobbio was offered to him by Agilulf, the king of the Lombards, close to the river Trebbia, on the edge of the Apennines. He died at Bobbio in 615. But his work was continued, with the greatest zeal, by his non-Irish disciples – by Franks from northern Gaul, Burgundians from the more “Roman” valley of the Rhône, and by Italians.2
As befitted a sapiens from Ireland, Columbanus had brought with him to Francia something of an enclave mentality. He was fiercely loyal to his teachers and to the precious stock of books that he had already mastered. Columbanus and his Irish monks persistently shocked the local Gallic bishops by celebrating Easter on a different date from everyone else. But, for Columbanus, his Easter was the “true” Easter, celebrated on the date that he had learned in Ireland. In Ireland, he had followed a dating system which had been approved of by Saint Jerome. His masters at Bangor had taught him that any other system for determining the date of Easter was “laughable.” The Easter calculations used in Gaul struck him as “trendy” and unreliable. Columbanus instantly wrote to Gregory as one sapiens to another to take up the matter with him. He addressed the pope, in his best Irish Latin, as “fairest Ornament and most honored Flower, as it were, of worn-down Europe.” He wrote to tell the pope that it was he who was out of step. Had Gregory not read his Saint Jerome? “How then, with all your learning … do you favor a dark Easter? An Easter proved to be no Easter?”3 No reply from Gregory has survived.
At the end of his life, Columbanus wrote once again to a pope. This time he did it at the request of king Agilulf. He rebuked pope Boniface, a successor of Gregory, for having given way to the emperor Justinian’s disastrous decision to bypass the Council of Chalcedon by condemning the Three Chapters (of which we heard in chapter 7). He assumed that the pope would accept his rebuke. Columbanus spoke of himself with rococo humility as “that little dove, that sport of nature, that rare bird.” Who was he, he added, “a bumptious babbler” and “a slow-witted Irish pilgrim,” to tell the pope what to do? And then, of course, he did so – and in no uncertain words. Boniface was not to sit on the fence. He was “to remove the cloud of suspicion from Saint Peter’s chair.” Columbanus professed to be shocked by “so much mortal sloth” in Rome, “I, coming from the world’s end, where I have seen spiritual leaders truly fighting the Lord’s battles … am quite astounded …”4
If we turn from the Letters of Columbanus to his Monastic Instructions and his Rule we see how Columbanus, though he alienated many, could emerge, in Francia, as a figure to be treated with awe and followed by many with ardent loyalty. It was his monks who heard him at his most urgent. His Instructions were preached in Latin to a monastic group made up of many “nations” – Irishmen, Franks, Burgundians, and Romans of the south. They were the equivalent of the more pensive Moralia of Gregory I. Their message had a starkness which makes even Gregory, for all the urgency of his belief in the approach of the Day of Judgment, seem to belong to a sunnier world. Like Gregory, Columbanus was deeply aware of the nearness of God:
This is no God which dwells far from us that we seek … For He resides in us like the soul in our body … Ever must we cling to God, to the deep, vast, hidden, lofty and almighty God.
And God had promised to those who served him: I shall dwell in them and will walk in their very midst.5
But this would happen only when the will and the body had lost their pride and their fierce lust. The body itself was a sight of horror. But this was because the body, with its labile flesh and slimy fluids, was no more than the horrifying externalization of something infinitely more slippery and corrupt – the “insatiable, rabid leech” of the unbroken will.6
Because of their untamed wills, human beings lived in impenetrable darkness. There is no sense in Columbanus, as there is in Gregory, of that ancient, Platonic mysticism, in which Paradise, though lost, might yet still linger in the mind, tantalizing the soul like the subtle whiff of the scent of fresh, ripe apples in a malodorous world. For Columbanus the corrupted will had brought humanity up against a blank wall.
How miserable is our state! The things we ought to have loved are so remote and undiscovered and unknown to us … O wretched man that you are! What you see you ought to hate, and what you should love you do not know.7
This is the reason why they had come to his monastery:
This in fact is the training of all trainings – the disciplina disciplinarum – and at the price of present sorrow it prepares the pleasure of unending time.8
There was no doubt as to the amount of “present sorrow” which Columbanus laid down for his monks. In the early days in the Vosges, his monks lived off the land, gnawing bark in times of famine.9 Even in the more stable settlement at Luxeuil they lived a life where they could hardly claim a moment as their own. Theirs was the heroic rhythm of the ancient monks of Egypt, not of contemporary Italy (where the wise Benedict – whose Rule Columbanus knew – had left room, in the day’s schedule, for a summertime siesta!). In the middle of winter, the pre-dawn service involved the chanting of Psalms for two and a half hours, followed by a short nap only before the next service began.10
Let him come weary to his bed and sleep walking, let him be forced to rise when his sleep is not yet finished. Let him keep silence when he has suffered wrong. Let him fear the superior of his community as a master, love him as a father, and believe that whatever he commands is healthful to himself … For though this training may seem hard to hard men, that a man should always hang from the mouth of another, yet by those who are fixed in their fear of God it will be found pleasant and safe.11
“Pleasant and safe” would hardly be the way that a modern person might characterize life under the Rule of Columbanus. But the secret of the success of Columbanus lay in his transparent confidence that the “training of all trainings” would work. Ground down by mortification, the will and the body would finally surrender to the presence of God: pain would be turned into desire.
Thus do Thou enrich my lantern with Thy light, I pray Thee, Jesus mine … that constantly I may see, observe, desire Thee only … and that Thy love may own us all, and Thine affection fill all our senses … and that such affection may be in us impossible of quenching by the many waters of this air and land and sea.12
The darkness would end, and they would find themselves in light.
The best commentary on the expectations which the preaching of Columbanus aroused in those who heard him is in the second book of the Life of Columbanus, which was written in 639–43 by his disciple, Jonas. In this he narrated a series of deathbed scenes. This was entirely appropriate, for they showed that the way to heaven lay through the convents and monasteries founded under the influence of Columbanus.
The great convent of Burgundofara (later known as Faremoutiers, in the valley of the Marne) was founded by a disciple of Columbanus. Jonas describes in gripping detail the deaths of many of its nuns. Ercantrudis, for instance, lay dying at sunset in her darkening cell.
After that, as black night rushed in and the last glimmer of light faded on earth, Ercantrudis [the nun] asked them to extinguish the lamp that burned in the cell where she lay.
Ercantrudis no longer needed the lamp. For her, the darkness had ended.
“Do you not see,” she said, “what splendor comes? Do you not hear the choirs [of angels] singing? … Oh give thanks to the Lord for He is good; for His mercy endures forever.”13
Faremoutiers was a convent in which it was believed that every sin could be forgiven. The nuns confessed their sins three times a day.
For it was the monastery’s custom to observe the rule that each woman should purge her mind by confession … erasing the least hint of spiritual weakness by pious disclosure.14
The psalm which Ercantrudis heard the angels sing at her death was the same psalm which the nuns had sung as they processed out of the church every day, having received forgiveness for their sins.15
Jonas, the biographer of Columbanus, claimed that his hero had introduced the medicamenta paentitentiae, the “medicines of penance,” to Gaul at a time when they had come to be neglected.16 By this he meant that Columbanus had brought a fierce asceticism, directed at every stage by forms of confession and penance which, as we saw in the last chapter, had been developed by spiritual guides in sixth-century western Britain and Ireland. It was the Irish system of “tariffed penance” which gave those who followed Columbanus the confidence that, by following his “training of all trainings,” they would go straight to heaven, “purged” of their sins. The convents and monasteries which sprang up all over northern Gaul after his death were treated as mighty powerhouses of prayer precisely because they were known, also, to be powerhouses of atonement.
The life of Columbanus and the subsequent arrival of other Irishmen (from other areas, which did not necessarily share the same traditions as Bangor) closed the gap between the Frankish society of northern Gaul and the hitherto unknown world that had grown up across the water. A new cultural zone, characterized by distinctive forms of religious life, was created in north-western Europe in the course of the seventh century. The Channel, even the Irish Sea, ceased to exist. Ireland, Britain, and the lands north of the Seine came closer together than they had ever been in Roman times.
In describing this process, it is important to maintain a sense of perspective. Columbanus and the sapientes of the Irish Sea represented a highly distinctive form of Christianity. But nobody thought of them (and least of all did they think of themselves) as out-and-out “exotics.” Columbanus presented himself as “Irish” only when it suited him. Equipped with bristling Latin, he acted with an almost total disregard of his Irish origins. He inspired and admonished Frankish bishops and Roman popes alike as one sapiens to another, as one learned man moving among his equals. He felt himself to be part of a network of religious experts which stretched without a significant break across Latin Europe from the Irish Sea to Rome.
Nor did the introduction of a new ascetic fervor combined with the newly developed system of “tariffed penance” constitute an entirely new departure in the history of western Christianity. In the Frankish world, Columbanus came not as a revolutionary but as a catalyst.
This does not mean, however, that the changes which he and his Frankish disciples helped to bring about were not significant. His intervention marked the beginning of a dramatic shift in the geographical location of monasticism and the culmination of the long process, which we described in chapter 9, by which monasteries came to take on a leading role in society. In the rich valley of the Seine, and its northeastern tributaries, the Oise, the Aisne, and the Marne, Columbanus found the most secure and prosperous region in western Europe. Known as Neustria, the “New Western Lands” of the Franks, or simply as Francia (from which we derive the modern word for France), this was a region of royal courts and of impressive royal and aristocratic villas. These were true palaces, towns in miniature. They controlled a wealthy countryside where Roman cities had never been prominent.
In northern Gaul and further to the northeast toward the Moselle and the Rhine (in what was called Austrasia) a new Frankish aristocracy had come into being. They were no longer adventurers and henchmen living off spasmodic royal bounty. They were heavily intermarried with Gallo-Romans. They were acutely aware of the fact that they had become great landowners on a truly “Roman” scale. They felt the need to leave a permanent mark on estates which they now controlled in perpetuity. Such persons were newly arrived to power. Honor and gift-giving, the essence of social relations in Columbanus’ Ireland, were matters of great importance to them also. Given the economic resources which they controlled, what they had to give was spectacular by Irish standards.17
For all his desire to live as a stranger among total strangers, Columbanus rapidly found himself implicated with powerful lay persons, Frankish kings and aristocrats, who wanted to tap into the vibrant holiness which he offered. Those who approached Columbanus thought instinctively in terms of the gift exchange. They would endow and protect monasteries and convents in return for having a powerhouse of prayer and atonement in their midst. They sought the surge of honor and prestige which came from close association with a holy place. Thus, Columbanus’ first major settlement at Luxeuil may well have been the gift of a king, Theuderic II (596–612). Though elk and aurochs roamed the Vosges and Columbanus himself would walk the woods, whistling down from the trees a squirrel which would perch on his neck and run in and out of his cloak, the monastery was placed in a dilapidated Roman spa, surrounded by classical statues. It was an ancient, royal place.18
In 610, Columbanus failed to meet this royal gift with the correct counter-gift of his blessing. He refused to bless the sons of Theuderic II by his concubines. Columbanus and his Irish monks (but not the Franks) were told to leave. By giving nothing in return for royal gifts, they had forfeited the hospitality which the king had offered them. In the course of this stormy exchange between Columbanus and Theuderic, cups of wine sent by the king to Columbanus exploded on the holy man’s table. The miraculous incident made plain that Columbanus would have no part in such gifts. Memory of the incident was treasured among persons who valued the gift-exchange, Franks and Irish alike. The exploding cups were a sign of the electric charge that ran through any gift relationship which bound these new monks to their lay patrons.19
Despite Columbanus’ exile, Luxeuil came to thrive. Ruled by Frankish disciples of Columbanus, it became a large community of 200 monks. It was recruited from and was frequently visited by the top aristocracy of Frankish Gaul. Its manuscripts betray the bureaucratic skills that were practiced at the Frankish court. This skill in letters was now applied to the copying of holy texts. With former bureaucrats from a royal court among its inmates, Luxeuil soon became something of a Vivarium of the north.20
But kings were not the only patrons of monasteries and convents. For the first time, we find large numbers of Frankish landowners of the north anxious to found monasteries and convents so as to place islands of untouchable holiness in the midst of their estates. These monasteries and convents were not discreet country cottages, as earlier monasteries had been in the Roman south. They functioned much as the great Roman villas had done in northern Gaul. They were economic centers which gathered an entire countryside around them. They often consisted of a group of churches and buildings which were deemed so holy that no lay person might enter them. Many were surrounded (as in Ireland) by extensive earthworks, which marked them off as “holy cities” in miniature.21 They were set in a countryside of waving wheatfields, served by the most advanced technology of watermills. They were the “honor” of the Frankish families who founded them made concrete and untouchable.22
To take only one example, this had happened to the family of Burgundofara. The visit of Columbanus to the residence of her father, Chagneric, was long remembered. It had “ennobled their home.”23 Faremoutiers, the convent founded by Chagneric and ruled by his daughter, Burgundofara, was a convent whose reputation for holiness was based on the utter purity of all its members. Each nun strove, as we have seen, to end her life totally “purged” of sin. The stories of the dramatic deaths of nuns of Faremoutiers made plain that here was a place where heaven touched earth. The holiness of the convent irradiated an entire agricultural region, much as the enclosed convent of Caesaria, within the walls of Arles, had protected the city.
These convents and monasteries were outstandingly rich. They had endowments of up to 20,000 hectares of land. They were protected by royal “immunities.” Royal agents and the local bishops alike suspended their rights to visit them, thereby making them appear all the more untouchable and holy. Far from weakening their prestige by doing so, the Merovingian kings positively basked in the glow of a holiness which they themselves had a hand in creating, through declaring them to be special, “immune” zones.24
What the kings gained from their grants of immunity was what Radegund had once provided, at the convent of the Holy Cross at Poitiers: powerhouses of prayer for the kingdom. The monastery of Corbie was founded in around 661, by king Chlothar III and by his impressive queen, Balthild (a former Saxon slave from across the Channel). The charter of immunity made plain what the royal couple expected:
that on account of this benefit the holy congregation may love even more to pray for the mercy of the Lord for the stability of our kingdom.25
Corbie later received, in the form of gifts from the royal warehouse at the Mediterranean port of Marseilles, regular supplies of olive oil (for the perpetual lamps of its church), Cordova leather (to bind its books and to provide soft shoes for its monks), quires of papyrus imported direct from Egypt, even dates and pistachios. Every year, some 3,650 kilograms of precious goods were carried north, across Gaul, in 15 wagons.26 Relics from the Holy Places, carefully labelled and wrapped in precious silks woven in Constantinople and Iran, were placed in the shrines of the monasteries and convents of Neustria. They represented a worldwide Christian order, now brought together with appropriate grandeur in the new lands of northern Francia.27
The new monasticism associated with the “medicines of penance” brought to Gaul by Columbanus was so popular because it had given an up-to-date, crisp answer to an ancient question. For centuries, East Roman Christians had approached the holy men of Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere, with one blunt inquiry: “Give me a word, Father. How can a lay person – a person ‘in the world’ – be saved?”28 Western Christians had done the same, if in a less explicit manner. The answers varied greatly from region to region, even from bishop to bishop and from mentor to mentor. No uniform system existed in Latin Christianity for the imposition of penance and the forgiveness of sin. What could be done with sin, indeed, remained an open question.
Many bishops looked back to what they imagined to have been the heroic days of the Early Church. There, it was believed, sin, penance, and forgiveness had been weighty matters, accompanied by a group drama of exemplary intensity, such as was described in chapter 2. As we saw in chapter 3, the emperor Theodosius I had sought penance of this kind from Ambrose, bishop of Milan, in 391, after the massacre of Thessalonica. He was remembered to have stood in church, startlingly divested of his crown and imperial robes, until he was re-admitted by Ambrose to the Eucharist in a splendid ceremony of reconciliation. Such high events were good to remember. Penance of this kind continued, but it was largely concerned with the very public sins of very public persons. Theodosius needed to undergo dramatic penance so as to restore his own credit in the Christian community. But what we call “public” penance of this kind was not the only form of penance that was available.29
For the average believer, the tradition established by Augustine in his controversy with Pelagius proved more significant. As we saw in chapter 3, Augustine denied that any Christian could ever be without sin, even after baptism. Penance, for him, was not to be directed only toward major sins (what Augustine called “capital” sins: that is, mortal sins). Penance must also touch those failings of everyday life which reminded all believers, all the time, of their fallen human nature. Such “light” sins were significant, but their penance was slight. In Augustine’s opinion, it was sufficient to recite every day with sincere regret the phrase from the Lord’s Prayer, Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us, and to show that one meant what one said by giving alms generously to the beggars crowded around the church porch. Penance, for Augustine, was not a spectacular remedy for occasional great sins. It was, rather, a frame of mind. It was a lifelong process, because sin, also, was the lifelong companion of the Christian.30
It was Gregory the Great who added a final, distinctive tone to the Augustinian tradition of perpetual penance. His contribution derived, in many ways, from a very ancient Roman past. The aristocratic tradition of moral guidance, represented by Seneca and others, had always urged its practitioners to adopt a never-ceasing attitude of “displeasure with the self.” Adepts must subject themselves to relentless inner cross-examination, so as to lay bare their failings and to correct them.
To this venerable, almost instinctive tradition, maintained among the Roman elites, Gregory added the entire world of the Desert Fathers, with their unflinching emphasis on the constant inner struggle of the monk and on the need for candor in revealing all sins to a spiritual guide. Both Columbanus and Gregory had read their John Cassian. They drew the same conclusions from him: all sins mattered; and all must be examined with medical precision if they were to be “healed.”
Hence the austerity of Gregory’s message. The more Christians strove for perfection, he believed, the more clearly they would see their own imperfection. For this vision of the self Gregory uses the word horror. By this, he did not mean the fear of Hell. Rather, he referred to a nightmare sense of vertigo experienced by pious persons at the sight of the sheer tenacity, the insidiousness, and the minute particularity of their sins.31 The righteous were encouraged to make their own the districtio, the “strict accounting,” of God himself.32 They must look at themselves as God saw them – that is, with the clarity and the divine impatience of an utterly just being, for whom a shoddy, unfinished soul was not enough.
These long-term developments reached back to the early fifth century. As a result, confession and penance became part of a religious quest in itself. The East Roman question, already posed in Egypt and Syria in the fourth century – how can the lay person be saved? – had become, by the sixth century, the principal form of piety throughout all Christian regions, in East and West alike. To seek forgiveness of sins, by whatever means of atonement was made available by local custom, was a concern that united monks, nuns, clergy, and lay persons of both sexes all over Latin Europe. All serious Christians wished for this. But, of course, not all Christians were serious Christians. Those who sought penance – be they lay or clerical – were the spiritually alert. They were often the well-to-do, who had time for spiritual matters and wealth to support spiritual guides. To use a phrase coined to describe the working of penance in seventh-century Ireland, they were an “elective elite.”33 They were not the average, unthinking Christian. No obligation to confess existed in the Church at this time. Rather, confession and the “medicines of penance” were actively sought out by pious persons.
For such persons, the Celtic system of “tariffed penance” did not come as a totally exotic novelty. It aroused no opposition. Its lists of sins and penances were easily adopted. They lent a final note of somewhat brittle precision to a religious culture already dominated by a penitential mentality. Columbanus, as we saw, appreciated the Regula Pastoralis of Gregory I. Though separated by hundreds of miles and each the product of a highly distinctive culture, the two men met as equals. Both belonged to a “culture of wisdom” whose highest ideal was the “doctor” who brought “medicine” to the soul.
The widespread “penitential” mentality also led to greater preoccupation with death and the afterlife. In the literature of the time, the moment of death stepped into the foreground. Seldom had the deathbeds of the saints been presented in such gripping close-up. For death was the test of penance. It was on their deathbeds that the souls of the saints were shown to have been “purged” of sin. As we have seen, Gregory’s Homilies on the Gospels and his Dialogues lingered on the deaths of saintly persons: globes of light rose to heaven, angels were heard chanting, and the air became heavy with unearthly fragrance.34
The atmosphere of Gregory’s Dialogues also suffused Jonas’ Life of Columbanus. The message was the same. It was unatoned sin, and not the heavy, physical body, which stood between the self and God. Once sin was gone, the soul could move, with triumphant ease, into the other world. Sisetrudis, a nun at Faremoutiers, had been warned in a revelation that she had 40 days in which to finish off her penance. After 37 days, two angels took her soul to heaven, for a districtio – a strict accounting – of her remaining sins. On the fortieth day, the angels reappeared. Her account was cleared. Sisetrudis’ soul was ready:
“I would go now, my lords, I would go now and delay no longer in this life of cares … I am now better prepared for the road” … And all who attended her departure heard an angelic chorus singing in full harmony.35
The emphasis on a glorious, light-filled death was not, in itself, a novelty. The martyrs and the great monks of Egypt were believed to have passed to heaven in such a way. What was new was concern for those who, very obviously, did not stand such a chance of doing so. For if entry into heaven depended on complete atonement of one’s sins, through penance, it was very hard to see how the average believer would ever get to heaven. It is for this reason that seventh-century Christians, in the West, turned, with novel precision and with a heightened sense of drama, to the issue of the passing of the soul.
Gregory devoted the entire fourth and last book of his Dialogues to exploring this topic. He knew that he was touching on a recent concern, which had not played an important role in previous Christian tradition. In his opinion, God was warning Christians, in the last days before his coming, by sending visions which revealed, more fully than ever before, the outlines of the fate of the soul immediately beyond the grave. It was like a landscape whose basic outlines were becoming visible, for the first time, in the half-light that precedes the dawn.36 The landscape of the other world included, of course, a well-known Heaven and a Hell whose horror was only hinted at. But it also included a new, intermediate region characterized by agonizing delay. “Unpurged” souls seemed blocked there. A learned, seemingly pious but pig-headed deacon, known to Gregory’s family, once made an appearance, after his own death, in the thick steam of a Roman thermal spa. He begged a startled bishop for his prayers. The prayers worked. He was not there next week. Plainly his soul had resided for a time in an intermediate zone, as painful for him as the scalding, suffocating steam of a thermal spring.37
Stories such as this marked, in retrospect, the beginning of a new age. Medieval persons looked straight back to the fourth book of Gregory’s Dialogues as the foundation charter of their own distinctive belief in Purgatory – that is, in an intermediate region of “purging” fire, where souls waited for a given period before they could enter heaven.38 But yet more dramatic and explicit visions would soon follow. The seventh century saw the flourishing of a new Christian genre – tales of the “Voyage of the Soul.”39
In around 630, the Irish abbot Fursa, from County Louth (a little south of Bangor, on the east coast of Ireland), passed through a “near death” experience.40 It was not pleasant. Though protected by angels, he was pursued by demons, raising the blood-curdling battle-yell of Irish warriors. But they were not merely hostile. They knew their Penitentials. They claimed him for their own. They said that he had not atoned for every one of his sins.
He has often uttered thoughtless words. It is not fitting that he should enjoy the blessed life unscathed … For every transgression that is not purged on earth must be avenged in heaven.41
On the way back, Fursa was engulfed in a billowing fire, which threatened to burn him:
for it searches out each one according to their merits … For just as the body burns through unlawful desire, so the soul will burn, as the lawful, due penalty for every sin.42
He emerged at last with the side of his face scarred. For, at the very last moment, a sinner to whom he had granted easy penance in return for the gift of a cloak was hurled against him, from out of the fire.43 Very much a product of the new cultural zone of northwest Europe, Fursa soon left Ireland for East Anglia. As he relived the terror of that vision, he was seen to sweat with fear in the icy winter chill of the North Sea.44 He died in Francia, and his story was circulated in northern Gaul.
It was not a tale calculated to reassure lay persons and those who had only recently left the lay life to seek atonement in a monastery. One such person was Barontus, a nobleman who, in later life, had joined the monastery of Logoretum (now Saint-Cyran-en-Brenne) near Bourges. A retired royal official and not a notable sinner – just a middle-aged man with three marriages and many concubines on his conscience – his experience was as frightening as was that of abbot Fursa.45
In 679, Barontus fell dangerously ill. It seemed to him that he was taken on a journey to Heaven and Hell. The issue was whether Barontus, the late convert, belonged to the angels who guided him toward a distant heaven or to the clawed, toothed demons who jostled his poor soul as it floated through the air above the countryside of Bourges. In Barontus’ struggle on the edge of death, it was his entire identity, conscious and unconscious, that was at stake:
Blessed Peter, addressing the demons, asked politely: “What crime do you have against this monk?” The demons answered, “Major sins! … He had three wives … He has also committed other adulteries and many other sins …” And they went over all the sins that I had committed from infancy onwards, including those which I had totally forgotten.46
He returned to earth, greatly shaken, to tell his tale. The story ends with a citation from the Homilies on the Gospels of Gregory the Great. “Let us consider how severe a Judge is coming, who will judge not only our evil deeds but even our every thought.”47
What is remarkable about such visions is the attempt to piece together a story of the soul after death. Stories which delineated the soul of each individual in terms of its precise individual sins and merits had not been widespread at an earlier time. Nor had so starkly “otherworldly” a perspective on human life been common. Up to this time, Christians had tended to be more interested in how the other world entered – and entered deeply – into this world. Paradise was thought to lie close to hand. So did the icy, mischievous shades of the demons. They were both to be sensed in this world.
When a Christian of an old-fashioned cast of mind, such as Gregory of Tours, surveyed the landscape of Gaul, it had kept for him much of its ancient magic. As we saw in chapter 6, he wrote of a Gaul that contained islands of Paradise, fully palpable, in the here and now, as was shown by miracles of healing and exuberant fertility that occurred in their vicinity. Limbs were restored. Trees blossomed. Mysterious roses were scattered over the floor of a saint’s shrine. In the same way, Gregory of Tours detected chilling touches of Hell, characterized by the smoking fevers, by the screams of the possessed, and by the vengeful fire which showed that the wrath of the saints was at work on earth. Touches of Heaven and Hell impinged on the day-to-day life of Tours. They showed that Saint Martin was still “fully present” at his shrine. The blaze of such a shrine in the present eclipsed speculations, in those who guarded it and visited it, about their own fate in another world. Compared with glimpses of paradise on earth, associated with the great shrines of Gaul, the outlines of the other world (and particularly of its intermediate zones) remained indistinct.48
For Gregory the Great, by contrast, and for those who came to share his views in the course of the seventh century, it is as if the Christian imagination had taken on a significantly different tilt. It looked away from this world, so as to peer into the world of the dead. Manifestations of the other world in this world certainly occurred. Demons remained active. Saints performed miracles. Paradise opened, visibly, to receive holy persons. But these intrusions of the other world into this world seemed somehow less important. The color drained from them, in comparison with gripping evocations of the dread last journey of the soul. This was the drama on which seventh-century authors lingered by preference as far apart as Ireland, Spain, Rome, and Gaul. For what truly mattered for those who wrote was now the dread occasion when, at the moment of death, the individual soul confronted the massed ranks of angels, saints, and greedy demons who guarded the thresholds of Heaven and Hell.49
Heightened interest in the fate of the souls of average Christians after death caused western Christianity to become, for the first time, an “otherworldly” religion in the true sense. Religious imagination and religious practice came to concentrate more intently on death and the fate of the dead. This happened because leading exponents of the new “culture of wisdom,” such as Gregory and Columbanus, had caught the entirety of human experience in the strands of a single net. All aspects of human life could be explained in the light of two universal principles – sin and repentance.50 Sin explained everything. Secular rulers exercised their power (so Gregory had said) so as to suppress sin and to encourage repentance. History happened according to the same rhythm. Disasters struck and kingdoms fell because the sins of the people had provoked the anger of God. Prosperity came when the people repented of their sins and regained the favor of God. Even the early medieval economy worked to the rhythm of sin. Massive transfers of wealth to monasteries and great shrines occurred for the “remission” of the sins of their donors. Above all, the human person was seen, with unprecedented sharpness, as made up of sin and merit – and nothing else. And death and the afterlife were where sin and merit would be definitively revealed by the judgment of God.
Thus, it was the emphasis on sin which gave to the average Christian an interest in the hitherto dim world of the dead. Previously, Christian believers had been, perhaps, happier and more confident of their salvation. But the other world to which they hoped to come had been more faceless. Apart from great, well-known saints, the identities of individual believers tended to be swallowed up in the golden haze of paradise. By contrast, for good or ill, the timorous Barontus had a face. It was a face sharply etched in terms of his “purged” and “unpurged” sins. These sins made him distinctive. He saw himself as built up, like a coral reef, by his individual sins and his individual virtues. They gave his personality a continuity which reached back even deeper than his present memory of himself. Barontus’ otherworldly experiences may seem bizarre to us. But they addressed with new precision the problem of how much of the present self survives, as a unique individual, still subject to the laws of sin and repentance, even beyond the grave. For this reason, the journey of Barontus has rightly been described as “a first sketch of the awareness of the self on the part of the individual in Western Europe.”51
These writings circulated among a spiritual elite and reflect their concerns. But they were not sheltered concerns. Barontus had recently been a lay man, and his vision shows us very plainly what was on the mind of lay men and women in the circles in which Barontus had moved. Death itself had become a problem for Christians. It takes some effort of the imagination to realize the extent to which this had not been the case in earlier centuries. What we call “the Christianization of death” was a centuries-long process, which entered a crucial phase at this time.52
It is important to stress the slowness of this process. We cannot know for certain whether Christians of the ancient Mediterranean world had been more confident than were pious persons in the seventh century that they would go to heaven. What we do know is that they retained complete confidence in the ancient Roman traditions of the care and burial of the dead. In the Christian communities, as among non-Christians, death, burial, and the subsequent “care” of the dead were matters for the family. The clergy played singularly little part in such matters. In cities, the dead were taken outside the walls and placed in private, family graves. Christians frequently lay among pagans. In the fourth and fifth centuries, there was no such thing as a clearly delineated “Christian” cemetery. A feature of Christianity which we now take for granted was simply not there.53
What really mattered for Christians of the fourth and fifth centuries was not the fact of common burial alongside other Christians (though, plainly, as Christianity progressed, most family graves in a given area would be the graves of Christians) but common membership of the Church. In many regions, the graves emphasized the fact that the dead were fideles, baptized Christians. Their families offered food, wine, and money at the Christian Eucharist so that their dead should still be “remembered” as part of the Church. But the relationship between the “remembrance” of the dead and their fate in the other world provoked little speculation. The gravestones themselves were singularly mute: most were content to announce that the dead persons were “in peace.” This may have meant no more than that their spirits were “at rest” because they had been properly buried and cared for by their kin. There was no such thing as a notion of distinctive “Christian” burial. A proper Christian burial was the proper “Roman” burial of someone who happened to be a Christian.54
In the course of the fifth and sixth centuries, these very ancient burial practices changed significantly in only one respect as a result of the cult of the saints. To be buried near a holy grave was to gain the hope of standing beside the saint, one’s patron and protector, on the day of the resurrection. Like iron filings suddenly regrouped around a magnet, the ancient cities of the dead changed, as Christian graves pressed in around the shrines of holy persons. Even the immemorial boundary between the city of the living and the city of the dead, outside its walls, was broken down. In many towns, the dead came to be buried inside the city, so that they could rest near the altars of urban churches. This change, however, affected only the privileged few. Members of the clergy, kings, aristocrats, and notably pious lay persons sought out the shelter of the saints.55
Burials beside the saints occurred largely in the Roman cities. For the vast majority of the population, “Christian burial” in a “Christian” cemetery was a matter of little importance. We only expect that it should have been important because of the later rise of Christian cemeteries and of the notion of burial in Christian “holy” ground. But this decisive development – the rise of the Christian cemetery – does not truly belong to our period. It was a later development. It showed the coming of a truly “medieval” order, which was not yet conceivable in the seventh century.56
What did matter, however, was what the Christian family could do for the dead. Here the seventh century was a decisive period. For it is in this century that the family’s “care” of the dead, which had been largely independent of the clergy, came to strike up a closer alliance with the clergy. The clergy defined more clearly the rituals which they had to offer; the laity, for their part, incorporated these rituals more intimately into their own care of the dead.
In upper-class circles, the penitential mood of the seventh century strengthened this alliance of laity and clergy. We can see the crucial change occurring in small ways. For the first time, in Christian grave inscriptions, the soul is made to speak to the living, not about its past (as was normal in Roman times) but about its present, anxious state. Gravestones presented the dead person as possessing the soul of a “sinner.” They begged for the prayers of others. The gravestone of a certain Trasemir, in the south of France, is covered with three great protective crosses. Along the top, the inscription reads: “Pray, all men, for the soul of Trasemir.”57
The issue, then, was who prayed best. For the powerful the great new monasteries were powerhouses of prayer for the dead. But, even when they were scattered throughout the countryside, as they now were in northern Gaul, monasteries and convents were special places. Average believers needed some other, more generally available form of help for the souls of their loved ones.
The tradition validated by the Dialogues of Gregory the Great emphasized the Mass as the only ceremony which could truly help the soul in the other world. Previously the fate of the soul of the dead person had been considered to be as much a part of the “care” of the family as was the burial of the body. Despite frequent expressions of disapproval by leading clergymen, Christian families had continued for centuries to “feed” the dead by eating around their tombs. Even their “offerings” on behalf of the dead at the ceremony of the Eucharist were thought of as an ethereal form of “feeding” their lost ones. Gregory of Tours tells of a lady in Lyons who would regularly offer Gaza wine of the highest quality for the Eucharist in memory of her husband. A deacon drank the wine himself and put vin ordinaire in the Eucharistic chalice. The husband appeared to his wife in a dream, and complained that he did not appreciate being “fed” with vinegar!58
Only in the seventh century did the Eucharist – the Mass – lose this quality of a “meal” relayed from the family to the dead. The Mass came to be spoken of, rather, as a “sacrifice” which only a priest could offer. The laity could contribute nothing to this “sacrifice.” And the Mass was offered at a time of danger. The soul was now thought of as being placed in a position of peril in the other world. Its sins might outweigh its merits and so expose it to being waylaid by the demons, as abbot Fursa had been waylaid. The ancient rituals performed by the family, such as bringing food and drink to “nourish” the soul, could not allay so sharp a peril. Only the Mass could do that.59
This was a more anxious view. But it was, in many ways, a more “democratic” one. Not all people could hope to allay their anxieties by being buried beside a saint, as the well-to-do and the exceptionally pious had been buried, or to be remembered in the prayers of a great monastery. By contrast, emphasis on the celebration of the Mass as the only ritual which was truly necessary for the care of the dead enabled a “grassroots” Christianity to spread all over northern Europe. By A.D. 700, even the smallest tribe in Ireland had its own Mass priest. They took care to maintain him. They held him to strict accountancy. They watched his chastity carefully. For they needed to have a man among them who could celebrate a valid Mass on behalf of their dead kin. He performed for them the one ritual which was now deemed basic to a Christian group, by “singing for the absent ones” (the dead).60
By the year A.D. 700, western Christianity had taken on features which would continue from that time until the present day: a highly individualized notion of the soul and a lively concern for its fate in the afterlife; a linking of the Mass to a notion of the “deliverance” of the soul, which opened the way to the medieval doctrine of Purgatory; a widespread emphasis on confession as a remedy for sin; a landscape dotted with prestigious and well-endowed monasteries. Little of this had been there in around the year 500.
Between the days of Saint Benedict, in the early sixth century, and the establishment of the monastic system of northern Gaul, in the course of the seventh, a very ancient Christianity, common to the eastern and the western shores of the Mediterranean, slowly lost its grip on the minds and habits of Christians in many regions of the West. In that ancient Christianity many of the features of the medieval Latin world which we now take for granted as, simply, what Christianity is and always has been, had not existed or, if they had existed, they did not enjoy such prominence in the Christian imagination. Many of the new features which came to prominence in western Christianity in the course of the seventh century do not exist in the Orthodox Christianities of the East. In Eastern Christianity, very different views of the afterlife led to very different attitudes to death and to the commemoration of the dead. The notion of Purgatory, in particular, remained ill-defined.61 It was the changes of the seventh century which, for good or ill, have caused western Christianity to stand alone among its Christian neighbors.
Many of these developments happened at the greatest speed, and in their most articulate form, in a world that had begun to tilt away from the Mediterranean. In the course of the seventh century, northwestern Europe found its own voice. Small details show this. When Gertrude, abbess of Nivelles (south of modern Brussels) died in 658, it now mattered to her biographer that it was on Saint Patrick’s Day. Her spiritual adviser had been an Irishman. He may even have been the brother of abbot Fursa. Gertrude’s Irish adviser was loyal to the memory of Patrick, the favored patron saint of his region. Gertrude feared the approach of death and the dread journey of her soul. He assured her that Patricius would come to her at the moment of death, to lead her soul safely to heaven. This is our very first reference, in a Continental source, to Patricius. After two centuries, the eccentric Romano-British bishop had finally come to Europe as one of the great saints of the north.62
Furthermore, Gertrude’s family (from which, eventually, Charlemagne would be descended) was spoken of as famous “to all the inhabitants of Europe.”63 It was a self-conscious use, by a Frankish writer, of an old geographical term to speak about a new reality. This was not Europe as distinct from Asia. It was “the West,” a distinctive definition of Europe, as seen from Ireland, Britain, and Francia.
As “Europe,” the northwestern frontier regions of the former Roman empire had come to be aware that they possessed an identity of their own, different from the less familiar lands to their south and east. Just how different the ancient, eastern heartlands of Christianity would become, in the decades when Gertrude ruled at Nivelles, and for what reasons, will be the subject of the next two chapters.