In the First Decade of the sixth century, Jacob, future bishop of Batnae in the region of Sarug, south of Edessa, described in a memre, a poetic homily, the manner in which the average parishioner might listen to a sermon:
When the preacher speaks of matters that concern perfection, it leaves him cold; when he tells stories of those who have stood out for their zeal for righteousness, his mind begins to wander. If a sermon starts off on the subject of continence, his head begins to nod; if it goes on to speak of sanctity, he falls asleep. But if the preacher speaks about the forgiveness of sins, then your humble Christian wakes up. This is talk about his own condition; he knows it from the tone. His heart rejoices; he opens his mouth; he waves his hands; he heaps praise on the sermon: for this is on a theme that concerns him.1
The Christian churches of late antiquity were full of such persons. Writing in the 420s against the moral perfectionism of the Pelagians, Augustine insisted that the peccata levia, the lighter, barely conscious sins of daily life that affected every Christian should not be held to exclude them from the hope of salvation. He wrote to none other than the patriarch Cyril of Alexandria that he had been accused by Pelagians of denying the existence of hellfire. He answered that not every sin led to damnation: “this error must by all means be avoided by which all sinners, if here below they have not lived a life which is entirely without sin, are thought to go to the punishment of eternal fire.”2 Many good Christians sinned through human ignorance and frailty. There would be room, eventually, in heaven for those “who indulge their sexual appetites although within the decorous bonds of matrimony, and not only for the sake of children, but even because they enjoy it. Who put up with insults with less than complete patience . . . Who may even burn, at times, to take revenge . . . Who hold on to what they possess. Who give alms, but not very generously. Who do not grab other people’s property, but who do defend their own—although they do it in the bishop’s court and not before a secular judge.”3 Such small sins could be atoned for, without recourse to dramatic public penance, by regular, unhistrionic practices—by the daily recitation of the “Forgive us our trespasses” of the Lord’s Prayer and by the giving of alms to the poor.4
Though reassuringly normal to modern, post-Augustinian eyes, such persons posed an acute problem to the late antique Christian imagination once they died. Augustine considered that their peccata levia were caused by a tenacious, subliminal love of “the world” and by habitual, unthinking over-enjoyment of its licit goods.5 Sins such as those were by definition pervasive and elusive. It was unlikely that they would all have been fully atoned for by the sinner in his or her own lifetime, even by the daily practices that Augustine recommended. Christian souls were faced with unfinished business in the next world.
Thus when, around 420, Augustine came to write an Enchiridion, a Manual of the Christian Faith, for Laurentius, a layman, he offered a definition of the category of the faithful for whom the traditional prayers offered by the faithful on behalf of the souls of the departed could be considered effective. Prayers were not needed for the valde boni—for such persons they were, rather, “thanksgivings.” They were of no help to the valde mali. But they were effective as “propitiations” for a broad category, which Augustine defined by means of a significantly open-ended non valde, a “not very”: the non valde mali, the “not very bad.”6 In writing in this way, Augustine faced a pastoral and imaginative situation whose consequences have attracted the attention of many of the best modern scholars. In his lucid book, In hora mortis: l’évolution de la pastorale chrétienne de la mort aux ive et ve siècles, Eric Rebillard has drawn attention to the transformation of traditional Christian attitudes to sin implied in the “redefinition of penance” in the Christian churches in the West in the course of the fifth century. As Rebillard makes plain, Augustine was not alone in the tendency to “dramatize the temptations of every moment” and to insist on a reshaping of the Christian attitude to sin: “it was no longer a matter of sins [that is, of crimina, clearly defined “mortal” sins, such as adultery, murder and perjury] for which the believer must obtain pardon, but, rather, of the confession that one is nothing but a sinner before God.”7 Inevitably, such an attitude gave to the peccata levia, the day-to-day sins of the non valde mali, a consistency, a pastoral importance, even a diagnostic status (as perpetual symptoms of the weakness and ignorance into which humankind had fallen since the sin of Adam) that they had lacked at a time when “sins” had meant, above all, crimina—the sins of the hardened, known sinner that the Church had the unique, indeed miraculous, power to absolve. The Christian church had shocked pagans by the apparent ease with which serious sins seemed to be forgiven in those who joined it. The Christian emphasis on forgiveness seemed to undermine the disciplina, the high moral tone, of Roman society.8 Now the image of the church as a sanctuary in which sinners became saints overnight, through conversion, repentance, and forgiveness, was replaced by a community where all members remained sinners. All Christians were committed to daily preparation for the hora mortis, for the moment of their death, through daily recognition of their sinfulness.9
But, as Augustine’s Enchiridion made plain, the story could not be said to end at the moment of death. The prayers of the faithful for the departed were taken to imply that the partially unatoned souls of the non valde mali faced further eventualities. Augustine remained characteristically economical in his description of those eventualities. It was enough for him to stress that prayers on behalf of the departed were effective in some way: they obtained “complete remission or, at least, damnation itself becomes [because of them] less intolerable.”10 The Christian imagination went further. The imaginative representations of the fate of the soul as it entered the other world varied greatly from time to time and from region to region. Such representations differed markedly in the degree of risk to which the soul was thought to be exposed. Upper-class Christian epitaphs in Rome, for instance, hinted that all but the most fortunate (that is, of course, the deceased whose virtues were celebrated on such an epitaph) might have to wait somewhat tremulously before being ushered into the sweet light of the presence of Christ, much as one would wait before being introduced into the intimate presence of the emperor.11 Monks in Syria and Egypt, by contrast, thought in more dramatic terms. On its upward journey to heaven, the departed soul was jostled by ranks of demons, who sought to claim the soul for themselves on the strength of the unatoned sins that each soul still carried with it. Such a “journey of the soul” was thought of as the last stage in the drama of the monk’s perpetual battle with sin, now rendered utterly palpable in a world whose terrors were no longer mercifully veiled by the flesh.12 Even Saint Martin was believed, by those around him, to have been confronted on his deathbed by the Devil. He addressed the Devil, significantly, as cruenta bestia, as a “bloodthirsty beast.”
The Devil was almost a personification of Death, the last enemy to be overcome in the long, living martyrdom of Martin’s life. But the Devil also came as a creditor, entitled to claim his dues, if he could find any in Martin.13 Looking back on the account at the end of the sixth century, Gregory of Tours stressed that aspect of Martin’s deathbed. If even the departing soul of Martin was forced to halt for a moment on its way to heaven to give account of itself to the Devil, then the average Christian had good reason to be anxious: “What, therefore, will happen to us sinners, if this wicked faction (pars iniqua) wished to have so holy a bishop?”14 A little later, in the seventh century, common anxieties about the departure of the soul were taken up and transformed into a series of dramatic narratives. The souls of a privileged few had set out for the other world. At the moment of their apparent death in the course of acute illness, their souls had been taken from their bodies, shown significant sections of the other world, and then returned to life, to recount their experiences for the benefit of the living.15
Faced with so many vivid narratives, we should be careful not to endow any one of them with universal validity for all Christians of the age. They were fluctuating and incomplete representations, such as are best described in the words of Claude Lévi-Strauss as the “fabulation of a reality unknown in itself.”16 They were pieced together from many sources to impose imaginative form on a problem that was almost too big to be seen. It is the problem itself that deserves our attention, and not the various imaginative representations that were conjured up from time to time to render it bearable, even thinkable.
Put very briefly: neither in late antiquity nor in the early middle ages should we underestimate the silent pressure exercised on all Christians by the inscrutable anomaly of death. As Eric Rebillard has shown, the fear of death had been dismissed, even repressed, in some early Christian writings. But, with the victory of Augustine over the Pelagians, a current of feeling that was already widespread among Christians was allowed to come to the fore. The fear of death was accepted as an irreducible, even a salutary, aspect of human nature. It could not be dismissed by the believer.17 Fearful, or simply awe-inspiring, the hora mortis, the “hour of death,” embraced an entire block of human experience, up to and beyond the moment of death itself.
Hence the care with which Fred Paxton, in his book on Christianizing Death: The Creation of a Ritual Process in Early Medieval Europe, chose the term “liminal” to characterize a fundamental aspect of the position of the dead person around whom the early medieval ritual of the dead came to be created.18 Borrowed from van Gennep’s study Rites of Passage, the term “liminal” conveys, in neutral language, something of the sense of anomaly, of the weight of conflicting emotional structures, and the sense of danger that surrounded the souls of the non valde mali as they left this world for the next. In the Christian imagination, the moment of death was an exact reflection, in miniature, of the terror of the Last Judgment. Theologians might be able to keep the “particular judgment” of the soul, after death, separate in their minds from the general Last Judgment of all resurrected souls and bodies at the end of time. But the fact that both were experienced as moments of intense and perilous “liminality” telescoped the two judgments in the minds of believers. Both caught the individual at a dangerous time, stripped of all customary forms of definition: stripped of the body and of an entire social persona by death; rejoined to a body, but not yet attached to a society at the moment of the resurrection, the human person waited in a state of painful depletion before the throne of Christ. Christ’s judgment would decide into which one of the two great societies to which all human beings must eventually belong the person would be incorporated—the society of the saved in heaven or of the damned in hell.
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.
The Ireland in which Fursey had his visions was a land of virtually no state power. As a result, it was a land without amnesty. Irish kings could be as forceful and as violent as was any Merovingian, but their power remained carefully masked by a “polite political discourse” that saw them still as no more than chieftains surrounded by free clients.46 Law and order derived from “elaborate norms of conduct . . . and a set of juridical institutions that positively sanctioned adhesion to these norms.” While a state like the Merovingian kingdom could impose adherence to these norms by fear of punishment, Irish law “controlled through a system of prevention and frustration of individual autonomy, which limited the social damage any one person could do.”47 Caught in a “system of control embedded in the kinship group,” the life of a compatriot of Fursey notably lacked high moments of amnesty granted by a superior power. Such power did not exist, or, if it did, it could not show itself in so starkly “vertical” a manner. Life was controlled horizontally, as it were. It involved the unremitting accumulation and paying-off of obligations: the making of honor payments to “restore the face” of injured neighbors; the offering of mutual sureties (which could include the grim exchange of hostages); the creation of agreements sanctioned by liability to distraint of cattle; innumerable claims from kinsmen, enforced in the last resort by “the horror of a visit by a professional satirist.”48 While Gregory of Tours looked out on what was still a late Roman society, where the daily exercise of power gave imaginative weight to hopes of amnesty on the Last Day, Fursey saw no such thing. What he saw, rather, was a world in which every debt must be paid and every wrong atoned—he saw a world that was a lot more like purgatory.
Hence the deliberately inconclusive nature of Fursey’s vision. Part of this comes from the fact that he was a man who had “returned” from the other world, with a message only about its lower reaches. But the emergence of that particular genre in itself implied a view of the world that would have puzzled a contemporary Byzantine reader, as would the many absences in Fursey’s account. The throne of God was nowhere to be seen. The escorting angels and the demons acted as if they were in a space of their own. The angels who escorted Fursey were impressive beings, winged creatures blazing with impenetrable light and surrounded by the sound of exquisite singing.49 But they lacked the brisk confidence of officials sent directly from the throne—instantly recognizable as such, as they would be in Byzantium, by their court dress.50 Nor did the demons offer their challenge according to the correct forms of Roman administrative law. They did not produce a heavy sheaf of documents to prove their claims for outstanding debts.51 Instead, the demons lined up against Fursey “in battle array,” showering him with arrows and setting up a spine-chilling battle yell.52 They knew their rights: “If God is just, this man will not enter the kingdom of Heaven. . . . For God has promised that every sin that is not atoned for on earth must be avenged in Heaven.”53 Only the angels who protected Fursey invoked a higher court by saying “Let us be judged before the Lord.” For the demons, that was the last straw: “Let us get out of here, for here there are no norms of justice.”54
More significant still, the fire that, in a late antique imaginative model, usually ringed the throne of God—and so was thought of as the last barrier between the human soul and the all-consuming fire of the presence of God-had lost its association with that throne. Cut loose from the divine presence, the fire acted as if on its own, guarding the threshold between this life and the next: “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 [of each vice].”55
Fursey’s Visions may seem exotic to us, but they were not a purely local document. They were written down in northern Gaul. They circulated precisely among the new elites of Francia, to such an extent that it was almost certainly to Fursey’s own brother, Ultan, that Gertrude of Nivelles appealed for reassurance as her own death drew near in 658.56 Fursey’s account of the other world can best be seen as a complement and a corrective to the penitential rigorism introduced into Gaul a generation earlier by his compatriot, Columbanus.57 This penitential system dominated the life of many great convents and monasteries, among them Faremoutiers. Stringent penance formed the background to the dramatic deathbed scenes among the nuns of Faremoutiers that are described by Jonas of Bobbio in his Life of Columbanus. Indeed, death itself was dependent on penance. Only those whose sins had been stripped from them in a lifelong “ordeal of community,”58 which included confession three times daily,59 would be sure to pass gloriously to heaven. More than that: only those who had done sufficient penance would be allowed to set off on that journey. Jonas’s account of the deathbeds of the nuns of Faremoutiers placed great emphasis on such delays. Sisetrudis was warned in a dream that she had only forty days in which to complete her penance. Her soul was taken from her and returned on the thirty-seventh day. Angels had held a discussio—a tax-audit—of her remaining sins. Three days later, exactly on the fortieth day, even these were paid off. Sisetrudis could die: “I will go now . . . for I am now better prepared for the road.”60
Behind many scenes, one senses the absolute power of the abbess. As director of souls and regular confessor to her nuns, the abbess was a “silent well of secrets”61 at the very heart of the convent.62 She guarded the greatest secret of all—the appropriate moment of death. Only when a nun had totally forgiven her sisters, unburdening herself of all her hidden thoughts about them, would she be set free by the abbess to go.63
In such circles, we are dealing with a sense of the self drawn out by long delays. Whether in the space of one life alone (as was hoped to be the case among the nuns of Faremoutiers) or in the other world, the soul had to prepare itself fully before it came before the throne of Christ. It was not a self that waited, peaceably or with anxiety, to receive the magnificent, but essentially external, gesture of God’s indulgentia for as yet unatoned sins. Every moment counted. All outstanding accounts must be paid off; every moment of the past mattered, lest any escape the memory of the penitent and so fail to be included in a conscious process of repentance and atonement. For persons considerably more frail than were the nuns of Faremoutiers, this was not a reassuring prospect. A long journey of the soul, similar to that endured by Fursey, awaited every one. And in that journey, what was at issue was the weight on the individual of the “unpurged” sins of a past life. In 678/9, Barontus, a late convert to the monastery of Saint Pierre de Longoret, near Bourges, underwent such a journey. He is an invaluable specimen for us, an average Merovingian: neither a thug nor a trickster, but a middle-aged former public servant with three marriages and far too many mistresses on his conscience.64 He returned to earth badly shaken. Demons had clawed and kicked him as he made his way through the air above the countryside of Bourges. Barontus never reached the throne of God. Instead, he was brought before Saint Peter and was accused by demons who showed that they knew him better than he knew himself: “And they went over all the sins that I committed from infancy onwards, including those which I had totally forgotten.”65
Barontus carried with him into the other world an entire life, in its full circumstantiality, made up of nothing other than the sum total of his specific sins and virtues. In that sense, the timorous Barontus was a sign of the future. In the concluding words of his monumental study, Le voyage de I’âme dans I’au-delà, Claude Carozzi pointed out that the penitent monk of this period “n’est qu’une première ébauche de la conscience de soi de l’individu en Occident” (a first sketch of the awareness of the self on the part of the individual in Western Europe).66
The text of the Visio Baronti ended 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.”67
Like the emergence of a new hybrid species, destined to dominate the ecology in which it is implanted, accounts such as the Visio Baronti represent the fusion of two traditions associated with the opposite ends of Christian Europe. On the one hand, Barontus belonged to a world already touched by penitential disciplines that had grown up in northern regions whose political and social structures were frankly postimperial. The notion of the indulgentia of God lacked day-to-day support in the practice of an absolute monarchy, whose power was shown by intermittent exercise of the sovereign prerogative of mercy. Despite the massive transfer to Ireland and northern Europe of the imaginative structures of the Bible and of late antique Christianity, the amnesty of God no longer stood alone and unchallenged in the minds of contemporaries, as it had once done in the late Roman Mediterranean. On the other hand, as the citations from the works of Gregory the Great make plain, texts such as the Visio Baronti drew heavily on the introspective, philosophical tradition of the purification of the self associated with the Greco-Roman world. Even in the presence of the overwhelming mercy of God, the Christian upholders of that tradition directed the attention of their charges, if only for a moment, away from false confidence in the indulgentia of God, as emperor, to insist on the authenticity of the conversion of the penitents and on their full responsibility for the working out of their own penance.
It is customary to keep these two worlds separate in our minds. The latter is associated with the prestige of a classical tradition of introspection and personal responsibility. The former is usually judged severely by historians of Dark Age Christianity. The penitential systems associated with the Celtic world are most usually treated as the products of a more “primitive” mentality: their widespread adoption in western Europe is seen as a symptom of the reemergence of “archaic” ways of thought in a barbarized society.68 But the two systems were drawn together by a fundamental homology. Both were characterized by relative indifference to solutions based on a model of indulgence, which drew its cogency from the practice of amnesty in an absolute, late Roman state. Once the notion of the prerogative of mercy as an attribute of the “imperial” sovereignty of God weakened in the minds of Christians in such a way that appeals to God’s power of indulgentia no longer provided a solution for the problem of the unatoned sins of the faithful, then the two traditions collapsed in on each other. What we often call the “highest” elements in classical and early Christian thought—the austere emphasis on slow, authentic change—joined what we are prone to call the “lowest” features of a barbarian Christian society—a penitential system in which satisfaction must be made for every sin. Both systems combined to create an imaginative structure that did justice to the silent weakening of the late Roman sense of the untrammeled amnesty of God.
In this process, the image of Christ himself changed in a manner which contemporaries barely noticed but which cannot but strike an observer who passes from late antiquity to the northern world of the eighth and ninth centuries. Christ, of course, remained a great king. But He also took on the features of a great abbot. The severity of his justice was no longer intelligible solely in terms of absolute power, tempered by gestures of imperial amnesty. What Christ judged, he judged now as an abbot. He searched the heart to establish the sincerity of the penance of each person, deciding whether and when this penance had taken its intended effect. What Christ delegated to Saint Patrick was the right “to judge the penance” of his proteges.69 Christ’s power was partly modeled on the powers of the abbot of a great monastery. He became the calvus, the “tonsured” Christ of Anglo-Saxon Latin poetry.70 In the Old Icelandic kenning, Christ is the meinalausan munka reyni—“Lord without stain, who tests the hearts of monks.”71
This evolution did not occur in other parts of the world. In exactly the same years as Fursey had experienced in one stateless society in Ireland his visions of the other world, in another stateless zone at the other end of the Roman world in the Hijaz, the visions of Muhammad had set in motion “one of the most radical religious reforms that have ever appeared in the East.”72 This reform went in the opposite direction to what was occurring in Western Europe. What emerged in the Qur’an and in the Islamic tradition, as it crystallized in the seventh and eighth centuries, was a singularly consequential reassertion of the empire of God. In a scenario of the Last Judgment more stunning and immediate even than that contemplated by Gregory of Tours, God would make plain that not only amnesty but the power to obtain amnesty through intercession depended unambiguously on God’s sovereign will. For even Muhammad’s rights of intercession, of shafa‘a, were defined as absolutely dependent on God’s prerogative of mercy: they existed only bifadhl rahmatihi, out of the supreme bounty of his mercy.73
And this mercy remained consistently overwhelming. The most optimistic estimates of Augustine’s interlocutors in the City of God as to what the power of God’s mercy might achieve for their fellow Christians became a central feature of the imaginative world of early medieval Muslims. Whatever men or angels might think, God kept for himself “ninety-nine parts of mercy.” 74 At the very end of the Last Day, he would not be content until the last Muslim crawled out of hellfire, blackened all over like a coal, except for the unburned patches on his forehead and two knees—signs that even this frailest of sinners had prayed the appropriate prayers of a Muslim. And God would joke with him, with the bonhomie of a great king, imperturbably certain of his power, and so in a mood, after a long day, to show mercy.75
It is helpful to take a step outside Western Europe for a moment, in this manner, lest we take its highly particular evolution for granted. In different regions, characterized by different social and political structures, a common Judaeo-Christian inheritance gave rise to very different imaginative structures. This is most apparent, of course, in the enduring contrast between Western Christianity and Islam. But, if we go back in time to the end of the sixth century, to the Italy of Gregory the Great, we can appreciate that within Christendom itself Byzantium and Western Europe had begun to go their separate ways.
In 594, as scholars of the period know, the Dialogues of Gregory the Great sketched out, almost for the first time, the “twilight” outlines of a world beyond the grave.76 The fourth book of the Dialogues, in particular, is filled with vivid narratives of the experiences of individual souls in a highly circumstantial other world. In these narratives, the fortunes of individual souls depended on the extent to which they had succeeded or failed to make due amends through penance for their sins in this life. Yet only a decade previously, around 580, when Eustratius, a priest in Constantinople, wrote a treatise on the state of the souls of the departed, he approached the matter from an entirely different angle. What concerned Eustratius was to prove that all human souls, and most especially the vibrant souls of the saints, remained “alive” after death.77 It appalled him to think, as his opponents suggested, that the saints died only “to rest and snore” until the Last Judgment. This was not so. Eustratius insisted that this world was flanked by a great city peopled by “citizens” who enjoyed a more vigorous existence than did the living on earth. Yet that was all that he was prepared to say. The basic category that concerned him in souls beyond the grave was their “life” and energeia, the effective activity of “living” persons. The “life” of the soul was what he defended against those who appeared to deny it. Eustratius barely thought of the life of the soul beyond the grave in connection with unatoned past “sin.” Sin did not concern him greatly. He took for granted that all departed souls carried with them abiding “flecks” of human frailty. But these would be forgiven by God in a final, all-embracing, but profoundly unspecific, because “imperial,” gesture of amnesty.78
Writing in Byzantium, Eustratius painted the other world with a broad, old-fashioned brush. In marked contrast to Eustratius, however, Gregory and his interlocutor, Petrus, set to work in the Dialogues with fine engravers’ tools. They etched memorably individual portraits, using the acid of the unpurged sins of a past life to catch a unique likeness of each person. They asked themselves, for instance, what complex calibration of God’s justice could catch the individuality of a man such as the deacon Paschasius. Paschasius had been a learned clergyman, a lover of the poor, altogether a figure from a late antique laudatory epitaph,79 whose funeral had even been the occasion of a miracle of healing. Yet he had been so pig-headed in his support of an antipope that he made his last appearance as a phantom in the steam of a thermal spa to ask an astonished bishop for his prayers.80 A precise notion of temporary suffering after death, undergone for particular sins, offered a way of seeing the respected, but problematic, Paschasius “in the round.”
It was “sin” and “merit,” acquired in this life and tested in the next with meticulous precision, and not only the “life” of the soul, which mattered most in Gregory’s definition of the human person in this world and in the next. In this shift of emphasis, we have come to touch upon a remarkable achievement of the early medieval Latin West. The period has usually been dismissed as a Dark Age of Christian thought, an age of “theology in eclipse,”81 characterized by “doctrinal stagnation and the riot of imagination.”82 But the heated arguments in the other world reported by Fursey and the evidence of lively conflicts of opinion in clerical circles all over northern Europe and the British Isles that ranged over issues relating to sin, penance, and the notion of impurity combine to give a somewhat different impression of the age.83 Its principal interests were not our own, and so it is easy to miss wherein lay its principal achievements. What the spiritual leaders of the seventh century may have lacked in zest for those aspects of speculative theology that we as modern persons tend to value, they more than made up for in a heroic effort to cover all known life, in this world and the next, in the fine web of a Christian notion of sin and forgiveness. Faced with this phenomenon, I am tempted to coin a neologism. We are dealing here with the final stages of what I would call the “peccatization” of the world: not with a “culpabilization” in the sense of the fostering of a greater sense of guilt in Christian circles but with something more precise and a good deal more significant—with the definitive reduction of all experience, of history, politics, and the social order quite as much as the destiny of individual souls, to two universal explanatory principles, sin and repentance.
When this happened, all that was not human grew pale. The mundus, the physical universe, that “great city of gods and men,” lost something of its glory and of its reassuring immensity. In a vision told to Boniface in the late 730s in Frisia, a view from beyond the grave no longer included the mundus in its glory, as it had appeared to pagan mystics of an earlier age as they ascended through its refulgent layers to the Milky Way and to the world beyond the stars.84 What now mattered for the visionary was a view of the sum total of human secrets. The basic model for such revelations was no longer a longing to embrace the universe from a high point in the stars. It was a longing to unveil the “hidden things” of the religious life, secret sins, secret virtues, secret practices told in the confessional or whispered into the ears of holy hermits—in sum, to penetrate the secrets of the individual. What the monk reported by Boniface saw was not the mundus: it was “the individual merits of almost all persons and the human race and all the world gathered before his gaze as so many individual souls.”85
And with that change—a change inevitably made to seem more abrupt, more irreversible and unidirectional in the short space of one essay than it was in reality, but a change all the same—we have reached the end of a very ancient world. It is an ancient world whose unmistakable profile we who study late antiquity have learned to recognize. But the distinctiveness of that profile stands out also in contrast to other forms of Christianity in terms of those imaginative structures that were central to its own life but which it did not pass on to later ages. After the seventh century, a new style of Western Christianity emerged. It was greatly preoccupied with issues of merit, sin, and identity and so found itself in need of a different imaginative world peopled with more clearly focused faces not only of the saints but even of sinners—the non valde mali of whom Augustine had written in his Enchiridion. The new Christianity of early medieval Western Europe did not wish to appropriate the rich imaginative structures of its own, more ancient past. An ancient sense of untrammeled power and mercy associated with the empire of God was lost along the way.86 As a result, late antique Christian views of the other world have remained either opaque to us or can seem strangely out of focus. The ancient other world, in its Christian form, is one of those many casualties of time that we tend to sum up in the somewhat anodyne phrase, “The Birth of Medieval Europe.”