The Prospect of Christ’s second coming can be terrifying. Even if the scenes described by John in Revelation do not represent the actual events of that day to come, there is little about the end that is not unsettling to contemplate. The terror results primarily, of course, from concern about our own fates or those of our loved ones. St. Augustine taught medieval Christians that no one—not even the most devout and blameless—can afford to be without fear when Judgment Day arrives: our fates have long been sealed, he proclaimed, and all we can do is to live piously and hope that we number among those whom God has chosen to admit into his heavenly kingdom. But one can never be sure. No one, he emphasized, deserves salvation—that is, no one can claim to be worthy of spending eternity in God’s presence—and only those whom God has inscrutably selected will receive that greatest of gifts. Augustine’s interpretation of predestination was not universally accepted, but the influence of his uncertainty principle was widespread and long felt. Most early medieval artists represented Christ as a stern judge, a king with a bad temper, rather than as a loving and gentle savior. His power received more attention than his love, and power inspires awe. Besides, the popular assumption of the early medieval period was that in all probability only professed monks and nuns would be saved on Judgment Day, if anyone would be at all; knowing how slim one’s chances were only enhanced the trepidation people felt when contemplating the end. Christian faith, in other words, provided early medieval people with many convictions, but a conviction of certain salvation was not one of them. Mark Twain’s wry summation of one of his fictional characters, that “he possessed all the calm confidence of a Christian with four aces,” is a description that would not have, nor could ever have, fit most early medieval faithful—with or without the cards.
But a second cause of the terror is the sheer dreadfulness of the event itself, even for those who are saved. Christian history ends with a bang, not a whimper; and the prospect of immense multitudes of sinful souls condemned to eternal torment evokes pity, even in someone like Augustine (although admittedly not in harder hearts like Jerome, Peter Damian, or Dante). Heavenly judgment is too severe a matter to feel complacent about. But a consistent note to be found among medieval theorists about the end is that whatever happens will be just. God will do the right thing, and we can take some comfort, however small, in that knowledge. Nevertheless, the unimaginable nature of that day means that a sense of uneasiness towards it is never far off.
Numerous medieval writers, however, argued that whereas the end is unimaginable, strictly speaking, it is still knowable. They believed that the works of the Hebrew prophets—particularly Isaiah, Ezekiel, and most of all Daniel—positively bristled with clues about what to expect and, more especially, when to expect it. The Revelation of St. John, moreover, provided a coherent blueprint of what to expect because it was, of course, the only work of authentic Christian prophecy. All that was necessary was to decode this extraordinary text. Interpretations changed over the centuries, with some writers favoring allegorical readings, others a variety of symbolic approaches, still others (though less frequently) a literal assessment. Whatever the approach, however, certain passages and images from the text soon came to dominate and center apocalyptic exegesis: the repetition of the sevenfold division of things (the seven churches of Asia, the seven angels with seven trumpets, the seven seals, etc.), the Whore of Babylon, the saintly reign of a thousand years. And even though most churchmen, beginning with Augustine, sternly condemned the practice, these images and motifs became increasingly used as tools for calculating the arrival of the end. By assigning numerical values to the letters of the Greek alphabet, Jerome identified the Beast whose number is 666 (mentioned in the thirteenth chapter) with the then-contemporary Vandal king Genseric, thereby intimating that the end was close at hand. In the eighth century, Bede laid the foundation for Joachim of Fiore’s popular heretical interpretation in the twelfth century by arguing for a seven-stage division of universal history, from Creation to Judgment Day, on the basis of the “seven churches” theme. Although Bede carefully avoided assigning specific dates to each period to remain orthodox, the clear implication of his book was that he and his contemporaries were living in the seventh age. Adso of Montier-en-Der, writing for his queen in the tenth century, drew heavily on both Jerome and Bede in positing his own apocalyptic millennialism.1
The legitimation of this sort of exegesis, this fascination with identifying repeated motifs, figures, and numbers in Scripture in order to unlock hidden secrets that would guide one to the Last Day, had many elements in it, varying from author to author, but at least one definite characteristic was shared by them all: namely, the belief that, however awful and inscrutable God’s power may be, his love for us is at least great enough that he would sprinkle a few clues around for us. The observable structural order of creation—the regular cycle of the seasons, the constancy of the fixed stars for navigation, the predictable reaction of the body to various elements (foods, herbs, sensations, or whatever)—carried and encouraged the implicit hope that God’s creation was capable of being understood and that if God’s creation could be understood, so too might his will, thereby improving one’s chances of salvation. More than that, they hoped, God’s love led him to scatter clues to his divine plan within the Scriptures themselves, the part of creation to which medieval Christians were enjoined to pay the closest attention. At the literal level, in other words, the Scriptures informed the faithful of how to live their lives, but at the hidden level they also gave away the due date—the specific point in time by which the faithful had to get their lives in order to improve their chances of salvation. Writers and enthusiasts of this sort of scriptural exegesis, so intent on discerning the “pattern in the rug,” so to speak, would have well understood and endorsed Samuel Johnson’s famous dictum about gallows and fortnights.
Among late medieval writers to tackle the subject, one of the most interesting is the Catalan physician-turned-mystic Arnau de Vilanova (ca. 1240–1310). Long known to historians of science for his twenty-odd volumes of writings on topics ranging from epilepsy to pharmacology, his late career as a religious reformer and apocalyptic alarmist has until recently been overlooked. Indeed, he is still virtually unknown to most medievalists, which is ironic because in his day he was one of the best-known figures in Europe.2 As professor of medicine at the University of Montpellier, he held the most prestigious position in the medical establishment; as an occasional diplomat for the Barcelona-based Crown of Aragon confederation, he was a prominent figure in French and Italian courts; and as personal physician to over a half-dozen kings, princes, and popes, he enjoyed extraordinary access to the centers of power. If that weren’t enough, widespread rumors that he had poisoned at least two of the popes he treated, Boniface VIII and Benedict XI, made him notorious, and the nature of his treatments of those pontiffs added to his reputation as something of a magus. A linguistic polymath, he translated his own scientific writings and those of others back and forth between Latin, Greek, Arabic, and Catalan. (While he seems to have had only a smattering of Hebrew, he was familiar with much of the Jewish tradition of medicine as well.) Much of the high regard historians of science have had for his work arises from his early championing of experimentation in the pursuit of scientific truth. Like only a few others before him, Arnau bridged the gap that often existed between medical theory and medical practice, and in the process he made significant contributions to the development of modern science.3
But Arnau was no proto-Enlightenment rationalist. A powerful emotionalism pervades all his writings, both scientific and religious, and in his treatment of the ill—most famously in his care of Boniface VIII—he frequently took recourse to magic amulets, incense, mysterious rites and chants, astrological portents, and numerological symbolisms. His treatise on love-sickness (De amore heroico) especially emphasizes the point that human passions, sensations, and intuitions often provide a more reliable insight to human actions than cool, theoretical thought. In Arnau’s mind, whatever worked was right, and he remained open at all times to considering instinct and revelatory emotion as equal to the powers of reason and controlled experiment. Indeed, he believed that medical knowledge itself could be the result and consequence of divine revelation.
Despite his high connections and busy pen, Arnau may have remained unknown to most Europeans until 1299. But in that year he took the extraordinary risk of reading to the Dominican scholars at the University of Paris the newest redaction of a work that he had originally written in 1288 and had kept hidden ever since, a work called De tempore adventus Antichristi.4 He was in Paris on a diplomatic mission for James II of the Crown of Aragon at the time, and he apparently could not resist the temptation of trying out his ideas. The timing was not accidental. Fluent in Arabic and familiar with Islamic beliefs and culture, Arnau was aware that the year 1288—the year in which he had his revelation about the approach of Antichrist—was, according to the Islamic calendar, the year 666, a reckoning rich with apocalyptic meaning. Moreover, by the time of his diplomatic errand to Paris in 1299, Pope Boniface VIII had already announced the Jubilee celebration for the following year. Religious excitement filled the air, and Arnau felt certain that the time was ripe for his announcement of the arrival of the end, which, on the basis of the ninth and twelfth chapters of Daniel and several passages in Revelation, he had determined would occur sometime between 1366 and 1376—a time close enough to inspire urgency, yet far enough away to keep alive hopes for the spiritual and social reforms needed to prepare the world for that day.
Arnau’s hopes for a prophet’s welcome collapsed, however, when the Paris theologians condemned his book and chastised him, a layman, for daring to venture into matters beyond his concern or ability. He appealed his case and kept appealing it until it came before the papal consistory in 1301. By this time his case had become a cause célèbre. Fortunately for Arnau, his trial for heresy coincided with a painful attack of gallstones in Pope Boniface VIII, and Arnau’s successful treatment of the malady put the usually irritable pontiff in a conciliatory mood. While vigorously rejecting the ideas put forth in the De tempore adventus Antichristi, Boniface demurred from anathematizing either the book or its author and in the end rebuked Arnau only for having presented his ideas in public as a layman without prior permission from the Holy See.5 Arnau characteristically interpreted Boniface’s action as a tacit approval of his ideas and launched energetically into a string of new treatises and screeds that elaborated both his hypothesis about the end and the reforms required to prepare mankind for it. His success was notable. According to one papal courtier, Arnau’s predictions of the end gained support “even among the leaders [of the Church, i.e., the cardinals] . . . they say that his predictions have already begun to come true, and they fear that all his warnings will come to pass.”6
After still more works emerged from Arnau’s pen, most notably a series of tracts attacking the intelligence and legitimacy of the “pseudo-religious pseudo-theologians” of the Dominican order, a spectacular trial at Perugia ensued in early 1304 and made him a kind of media star. (Decades later he was still mentioned, with a glint of admiration, by Chaucer at the end of the Canon Yeoman’s Tale.) A number of grim Dominicans, who regarded his claim to have unlocked, finally, the knotty mystery of the prophets and Revelation as an unendurable layman’s presumption, wanted to see his works condemned and their author imprisoned. There is some evidence that their concerns were not entirely theological. The same courtier who noted Arnau’s success at winning converts to his apocalypticism also claimed to have overheard one cardinal lamenting to another Arnau’s cure of Boniface’s illness: “If only that Arnau hadn’t come! For the simple truth of the matter is that [Boniface] would be dead and buried by now, if not for him.”7
The next pope, Benedict XI, was himself a Dominican and had little patience with lay prophets of Arnau’s sort, especially with ones who could claim a certain degree of intellectual bona fides. Making matters worse, Arnau had since turned his energies away from Joachimite apocalyptic prophecy (on the assumption that he had already done all that he could to prove his case about the approaching end) and towards the social and ecclesiastical reforms that he thought must happen in order to prepare the world for Antichrist’s, and thence Christ’s, approach. While no formal link appears to have occurred, Arnau allied himself sympathetically with the heterodox splinter group of the Franciscan Spirituals, the radical branch of the Franciscan order that was the most zealously devoted to the idea of evangelical poverty and Church reform. The Spirituals, in short, believed that the imitatio Christi incumbent upon all clergy carried with it an absolute obligation to renounce all wealth and property and that the Church as it then existed, with its vast estates, magnificent palaces, and concern for collecting ecclesiastical taxes, had either lost or was in danger of losing all spiritual authority—precisely at the point in time when Antichrist’s approach seemed imminent and therefore the need of the faithful for a purified Church was at its highest. This was the spirit behind Arnau’s declarations of his “evangelical detestation of the corrupt practices within the Catholic orders” and especially among the “dragons and serpents” of the Dominicans, who reviewed Arnau’s every utterance with a suspicious eye from their comfortable—and in Arnau’s opinion, wholly undeserved—university posts.8
As previously mentioned, tensions came to a head in early 1304 when Arnau, with a characteristic lack of realism, approached Benedict at a church council in Perugia in order to gain papal approval for his latest eschatological theories. To say that he failed is an enormous understatement. Benedict showed not even the slightest interest in or sympathy with Arnau’s imaginings, but he also happened to fall extremely ill during the council and agreed to put himself under Arnau’s medical care. Once again the physician took precedence over the prophet, and Arnau did his best. Benedict died, however, and suspicions arose anew about Arnau’s complicity. (We do not know enough about Benedict’s symptoms to guess what actually killed him.) Arnau landed in prison, without a papal or royal patron to protect him, and with inquisitors lining up for the opportunity to put him through the interrogational wringer. Petitions poured in from sympathizers across Europe asking for mercy on his behalf, but there seemed to be little hope. Arnau had always relied, whether he admitted it to himself or not, on the hope of a papal benefactor who might be willing to countenance his religious fantasies in return for his medical knowledge. With no pope on the scene, however, and indeed with rumors running rampant that Arnau had contrived to poison Benedict because of that pope’s insensitivity to his spiritual pleadings, matters looked grim.
But then something very strange happened: the cardinals, immersed in the task of choosing a new pope, decided to free Arnau. No one knows precisely why, but several explanations seem possible. First, a number of the cardinals may simply have wanted Arnau out of their hair as they worked on the delicate negotiations of selecting a new pontiff. The presence of a popular, reform-minded rabble-rouser like Arnau certainly would not have made the scene of backroom bargaining any easier, given all the attention being accorded to his imprisonment. Releasing him would seem a much better option than leaving him, and supposedly his supporters, on the site of such important negotiations. Another possible explanation is that those cardinals who were reportedly avid supporters of Arnau’s prophecies managed to persuade the others that his ideas, while strange enough, were not intrinsically heretical—for how could one prove him wrong without waiting to see what happened in 1376 (the terminus of the ten-year span in which he predicted the end-times would begin)? This is perhaps unlikely, for there is evidence that to many observers it was Arnau’s lay status, not his ideas themselves, that was the issue.9 A greater possibility exists that Arnau’s age (he was then approximately sixty-five) and the shock of his imprisonment and rumored complicity in two papal murders convinced many at court that he had been left a broken man who would soon enough disappear from the scene.
If such was the case, those hopes did not last long. Freed from prison, Arnau, whose health remained vigorous, went into a self-imposed exile at Messina, the site of the royal court of the Catalan Sicilian monarch Frederick III. He remained at court for about a year, during which time he penned a treatise for the king’s benefit called the Allocutio christiani de hiis que conveniunt homini secundum suam propriam dignitatem creature rationalis (The Address of a Christian Regarding Those Things That Pertain to Man by Virtue of His Dignity as a Rational Creature).10 In this work Arnau argued energetically for a rationalist view of the world and of mankind’s unique place in it. God gave man the ability to reason, and, Arnau stressed, there has to be a reason for that: “God and Nature do nothing purposelessly,” he had written as early as 1288. The created world operates according to endlessly complex but inherently rational principles (although, as in many aspects of Arnau’s own medical work, his interpretation of the rational seems excessively broad by modern standards), and God has given Man the power of reason in order that he might understand those principles. This is proof-positive, in Arnau’s mind, that God wants mankind to figure out the order and meaning of life. God’s truth lies imbedded in the physical world just as it suffuses and defines Holy Scripture; all that is required is to read correctly the evidence of his Truth that God has planted all around us. And since reason is the key to that ability, and since all mankind, by definition, possesses that trait, then unlocking the heavenly mysteries is not and cannot be the exclusive domain of the clergy.
This was startling and dangerous stuff. Perhaps still shaken by his close escape at Perugia, Arnau did not circulate the Allocutio and left much of its religious argument implicit and hinted at, rather than explicitly asserted. Indeed, after making his initial argument, he quickly turned most of his attention in the Allocutio to advising Frederick of Sicily to adopt a number of specific social and institutional, as well as spiritual, reforms. The Allocutio is Arnau’s first work that bears unmistakable evidence of his allegiance to the heterodox splinter group, the Franciscan Spirituals (or Spiritual Franciscans), although some traces of his leaning towards them came earlier.11 This would seem to have invited an ecclesiastical backlash, but none came—presumably because the cardinals were still engrossed in the difficult search for a new pontiff, one that would ultimately result in the election of Clement V and the papal exile to Avignon.
Arnau took advantage of the relative calm and the amenities of Frederick’s court to produce his major religious work, the Expositio in Apocalypsi (Commentary on Revelation).12 We do not know for certain whether he finished the book during his Sicilian tenure, but he almost certainly wrote most of it while there. He mentions Clement V, who became pope well into 1305, at a point over three-fourths of the way through the long book, and we know that Arnau only ended his island idyll in order to present his Expositio to the new pope, hoping once again to win a papal protector and legitimator. The Expositio both fascinates and infuriates; more than any other of his religious books it shows all of its author’s strengths and weaknesses. Passages of considerable insight, of venomous spite, and of gargantuan hubris all jostle with one another for position on the page. We do not know Clement’s specific reaction to the book, but he clearly dismissed it and this must have disappointed Arnau considerably because only a few years earlier Clement (then Bertrand de Got, archbishop of Bordeaux) had expressed sympathy for Arnau’s plight in the contest between Boniface VIII and the Dominicans over Arnau’s theories about the Antichrist. Still Arnau did not give up hope. As late as 1309, when he was near seventy, he continued to send his new writings to Clement; and on at least one occasion, he traveled to Avignon in order personally to read a new work to him.13
The Expositio begins cagily. Arnau distinguishes carefully between visio and intellectus, “vision” and “understanding.” Only true prophets, those uniquely blessed by God and the precursors of the Christian clergy, possess the power of visio; but intellectus, while a God-given gift in the way that any remarkable human talent is, is something that is at once both lesser and greater than visio. It is lesser because its possessor cannot claim the same sort of mystical union with God that a true prophet enjoys and that enables him to speak as a mouthpiece for the Lord himself, but greater because those with intellectus may yet legitimately claim to understand the truth of someone else’s vision, provided that God grants such a person the power to understand, and even to understand that vision better than the prophet himself who experienced it. Arnau’s point is not that God favors an Adam Smithian sort of specialization of labor but rather that God suits both his revelations and the understandings of them to the points in history when they are needed. Citing the case of Daniel—the figure on whom Arnau’s calculations of the end most depend—Arnau asserts that Daniel’s prophecies, for example, as understood by the Jews of the second century B.C.E. sufficed for the needs of that time. But as centuries passed and Christ’s appearance on earth ushered in a new revelation of God’s design for man, such prophecies take on different meaning and require different interpretation, for “the messages contained in visions lie buried deep within them” and “God, who is the author of all visions, grants the proper understanding of them . . . whenever He wishes and to whatever extent He wishes.”14
The various explications of Daniel’s prophecies by Christian writers, whether mystical, moral, symbolic, allegorical, or literal, have once again been geared, according to Arnau, to the specific needs of the times they were written, so that those later expositors’ understanding of the vision is “even greater than” that of the original prophet. The time has now come, Arnau concludes, to move beyond these sequential and one-dimensional interpretations, to synthesize their wisdom, and to offer a full and final reading of the Scriptures. By pairing the works of the prophets with the apocalyptic text of Revelation, Arnau argues, the certain truth of what we can expect at the end, what it will mean, and when we may expect it, can at last be revealed. What makes this possible is the very bounty of God’s goodness: since he has always given as much revelation of his Truth as was needed throughout history, now that history is soon to end, the time has come for God to make his final revelation via the person or persons who possess both the spiritual health and the reason-based intellectus that will allow them to see the Truth and to see it whole.15
In this way Arnau cleverly avoids claiming prophetic gifts for himself—which would have guaranteed the reopening of charges of heresy against him—while nevertheless establishing himself as a legitimate prophetic voice. And what does that voice say about the end (apart, that is, from the timing of its arrival, which he had already dealt with in earlier works)? His Expositio offers, for all its claims to completing and perfecting the explication of the Revelation, a thoroughly, if not quite conventionally, Joachite eschatology, although he does refine Joachim’s system somewhat by emphasizing throughout the heightened importance to be played by the “proclaimers of evangelical truth” who made up Arnau’s most ardent followers—both among the Franciscan Spirituals and among evangelical laypersons. He follows the standard format of verse-by-verse glosses. The angel of 1:8, who announces the revelation to John, is likened to the “angelic pope” predicted by Joachim but also represents the universi praecones incorrupti evangelicae veritatis. In fact, Arnau suggests, the latter group is likely to be more important than the “angelic pope” and his clergy because the trumpet blast that began John’s vision came from behind him (I:II): God, Arnau hints, always speaks directly to his established clergy, and this sort of indirect communication can only signify that it is the nonclerical faithful who will receive, and who in fact already have received, the full intellectus of the end.
Most of the rest of the Expositio repeats, with some slight modifications, the traditional Joachite interpretation. Thus the three persons of the Trinity correspond to the three ages (status) of history, to be calibrated against the seven periods (tempora) of history as represented by the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit and the seven churches of Asia to whom John speaks. Since the seven churches symbolize the Church as a whole, all of the spiritual and social reforms that must be accomplished before the end must be spearheaded by the angelic pope, but Arnau introduces an evangelical correptor (from corrigere, “to correct” or “to improve,” rather than from corripere, “to snatch” or “to steal”) who will serve as the pope’s spiritual adviser and guide.
But what, specifically, will happen to the faithful once the correptor and the “angelic pope” have fulfilled their missions and have purified as much of the expectant world as possible? What will our bodies physically experience? Bodily resurrection of the dead and the physical assumption of the living have stood at the center of Christian eschatology at least since Paul wrote his epistles.16 But will the faithful enter paradise in their healthy twenty-year-old bodies or in the weakened persons of their dotage? Will physical imperfections, even relatively harmless ones like nearsightedness, persist? Does it matter? Here the Expositio in Apocalypsi remains maddeningly silent—but then, so does Revelation itself. The fact that Arnau, following John, never attempts to describe God’s appearance in anthropomorphic terms but only refers to it as “an impression of light” tells us little. John mentions crowds and voices, multitudes and choirs, but angels, not humans, dominate his vision, and consequently Arnau’s exposition.
The fact that Arnau’s medical writings and medical activities continued throughout the last two decades of his life, after his evangelical conversion, suggests that he saw his medical and religious callings as compatible. “All the sciences share in a common usefulness, namely the acquisition of perfection in the human soul, preparing it, in effect, for all future happiness,” he wrote in his Commentum super canonem “Vita brevis.” Moreover, he repeatedly referred to medicine as “the most noble of sciences” and “the summit of nobility.” He singled out St. Luke, a physician, as uniquely important among the four Gospel writers; in his Address at Bordeaux, for example, he boldly chastises his critics: “I tell you, that if anyone rejects my religious writings simply because they were written by a physician, then he does not walk in the path of Christ, since Christ himself did not exclude physicians from understanding the sacred teachings.” And in what might have appeared in another writer as a mere rhetorical flourish but in his case clearly flirted with danger, he often described Christ himself as the medicus supremus and medicus summus of all Creation, whose Truth was literally the best medicine for mankind.17
Correlating physical health with spiritual health was a common conceit in the Middle Ages, but Arnau took the idea to new heights. Two basic paradigms existed for understanding human nature, and each had an influence on Arnau’s medical and religious thinking; the first, associated chiefly with the Jewish tradition, defined man as enlivened flesh, an essentially corporeal being temporarily brought to life by God’s infusion of spirit; the second, more explicitly Christian in nature, viewed man as embodied soul, an essentially spiritual (and thereby timeless) being momentarily given a physical aspect. Both paradigms posited a correlation between physical and spiritual well-being, but the connection was considerably stronger and more explicit in the latter—and it was this fact that lay behind the large dose of what we today would call magic in medieval Christian medicine.18 Arnau’s use of amulets, incense, and astrology in treating Boniface VIII’s gallstones in 1301 reflected this connection because the “magical” aspects of the treatment aimed, in theory, at curing the spiritual component of Boniface’s ailment while the “nonmagical” treatments (warm baths, soft foods, weak broths, and some herbal medicines) addressed the physical component. Boniface himself indirectly endorsed the soul-related nature of medicine and the body when, joyfully recovering from his complaint, he announced to the papal court “I did not realize it until now, but now I proclaim it aloud—this man [Arnau] is the greatest cleric in the world!” To describe Arnau as a clericus clearly implied a recognition in him of some sort of spiritual power. Boniface’s words no doubt also bolstered Arnau’s hopes of papal support for his apocalyptic prophesying.19
Those hopes were dashed, however, when Boniface refused to endorse Arnau’s eschatology (although Arnau made it a point, in subsequent years, to point out that Boniface had never formally condemned his ideas either). When Boniface died two years later, after being assaulted by Philip IV’s henchmen at Anagni, Arnau penned a blistering essay, De morte Bonifacii VIII, in which he attributed the pontiff’s death to the sickness of his soul rather than to the violent humiliations inflicted on his aged body. What was that soul-sickness, according to the physician? Boniface’s refusal to recognize the truth of Arnau’s religious message.20 An assertion this audacious might well have led to arrest, were it not for the fact that Boniface had left so many enemies behind him. One can easily imagine some figures at court furtively enjoying Arnau’s declaration that Boniface had died of his own spiritual wickedness. Whatever the case, no trouble arose from the essay and its extraordinary claims. It is worth noting, however, that Arnau did not dare to offer a similar spiritual autopsy of Benedict XI.
Shortly after completing his Revelation commentary, Arnau tried during the papal interregnum to gather support from other branches of the Church. He appealed to a handful of bishops, mostly Catalans and Provençaux, whose sympathy he thought would be helpful; but he also turned, somewhat unexpectedly, to the Carthusian monastic order, which was then embroiled in a debate with its critics over the propriety of giving severely ill brethren meat to eat to improve their strength as opposed to the ideal of complete meat avoidance. While often overlooked by historians, the questions of whether to eat meat was briefly as significant an issue to the Carthusians as the definition of poverty was for the Franciscans in the years around 1300. The relative smallness of the order and its austere isolation probably account for the neglect and also raise the issue of how Arnau got involved with the Carthusians. It seems highly unlikely that the order sought out Arnau’s help in resolving its dietary dispute; he was far too suspect a character. Instead, Arnau probably saw his entering the fray as a way to regain some of his lost respectability after the debacle at Perugia and his Sicilian exile. However it came about, Arnau quickly produced a treatise De esu carnium (On the Eating of Meat) that defended the practice of meat abstinence in both medical and spiritual terms. Though still unpublished, it offers a useful window into Arnau’s thinking on human nature and may suggest what, if anything, he expected to happen on the Last Day.21
Every aspect of human life, Arnau argues, is suffused with moral meaning. The decisions of everyday life—whether to drink a cup of wine, to work at one’s trade, to bathe, to make love with one’s spouse, or to read a book—are both the products of and influences upon our moral and spiritual well-being. (In the health regimen that he composed for King James II of the Crown of Aragon, Arnau even attributed a moral element to the act of breathing: not only did the king’s body require fresh air for health, but so too did his mental capabilities and powers of judgment, and therefore the earthly well-being, and ultimately the spiritual fate, of James’s subjects depended on the king’s proper breathing.) As God’s supreme creations, our souls and bodies are, in their natural state, wholly healthy and perfect. True, the temporal encapsulating of our souls in human flesh carries with it the unavoidable stain of original sin, but the waters of baptism restore us to pristine perfection. From that point on, life is a continuous moral combat in which nothing is without spiritual meaning.
Arnau’s case for Carthusian meat abstinence rests on five main arguments: the logic of love, the necessity of tradition as the best defense against heresy, the evidence of medical science, the authority of Scripture, and the evidence of direct observation. It is an interesting combination, one that reflects Arnau’s privileging of the traditionally Christian definition of human nature as soul-within-a-body as opposed to the traditionally Jewish notion of body-given-life. Three of the arguments deal with the soul, while only two deal with the body, and yet in this text Arnau is writing specifically as a physician rather than as an apocalyptic prophet. The arguments run roughly as follows.
1. The logic of love. Critics accuse the Carthusians of failing to love their ill brethren by withholding from them a form of nutrition that would alleviate their bodily suffering, yet the Carthusians’ vow of meat abstinence results from, and serves as an expression of, their absolute love of God. It is demonstrably illogical, Arnau argues, to insist that a practice that emerges from the greatest of all possible loves can ever devolve into, or be interpreted as, an absence of love. To love God with such totality is to love all those who offer God the same love, the same vow, the same totality.
2. Tradition as bulwark against heresy. Given his own notoriety as a heterodox thinker, Arnau here flirts openly, if characteristically, with danger. He identifies two types of heresy: overt opposition to the Church’s teachings and authority and the assertion of novel ideas about the universal human condition—in essence, the redefinition of human nature. The Church’s own long history, he points out, validates the practice of abstinence, whether from meat or any other substance, and therefore to assert the illegitimacy of meat avoidance in principle is in effect to reject the Church’s historical authority and is therefore tantamount to heresy. On the second point, he argues that to insist that human bodily survival is impossible without meat consumption is essentially to redefine the very nature of the human body—a universalizing activity if ever there was one—that runs contrary to medical knowledge, the teachings of Scripture (where does the Bible say that Jesus ever ate meat?), and the observable longevity of vegetarians. Arnau concludes by pointing out that Jesus himself, according to both Matthew and Luke, urged his disciples: “Do not worry about your life and what you are to eat, nor about your body and how you are to clothe it. For life means more than food, and the body more than clothing” (Matt. 6: 25, Luke 12: 20).
3. Medical evidence. This point receives the most amplification and specificity; indeed, it accounts for over half of Arnau’s text (disregarding the introductory and concluding passages). It shows Arnau at his most Galenic, emphasizing the proper balance of “vital forces” and “humors.” Setting aside violent causes for the time being, he says that death results either from disease or from malnutrition. If a condition arises from disease, the proper course of treatment is medicinal—in which case the introduction of meat into what has previously been a meatless diet will either prove to be futile and irrelevant at best or will prove harmful at worst by disrupting the natural balance of forces and humors. If the problem is indeed nutritional, however, then substitutes for meat (such as egg yolks and diluted wine) represent more medically sound choices because meat itself is most appropriate for individuals regularly engaged in vigorous physical activity, which is hardly an accurate depiction of Carthusian life.
4. Scriptural authority. This brief section of the treatise comprises a highly selective dietary summary of biblical history. No fatted calves here: Arnau mentions only those examples that meet his purposes. David gave bread, figs, and raisins to the servant of the Amalechites; Jesus distributed bread and fish to his famished followers; while Paul instructed the Romans that “People range from those who believe they may eat any sort of meat to those whose faith is so weak they dare not eat anything except vegetables. Meat-eaters must not despise the scrupulous” (Rom. 14: 2–3).
5. The evidence of our eyes. Arnau notes with a certain malicious glee—the same sort of emotion that lay behind his delighted singling out of incompetent Dominican physicians at Paris—that Carthusian monks are indeed famous for their longevity, with many reaching the age of eighty and a few particularly blessed individuals reaching ninety, one hundred, and beyond. A diet lacking meat, he concludes, shows no deleterious effect on the monks in general and therefore cannot in any way be considered a fault or shortcoming in their life regimen. Those who cannot recognize this obvious fact are fundamentally unqualified to judge Carthusian practice. The net result of these arguments, whether explicit or implicit, is that what is good for the soul is good for the body, though not necessarily vice versa, and herein lies the essential difference between the Christian and Jewish traditions with which Arnau was so familiar. A healthy soul provides proof-positive of a healthy body, barring exceptional circumstances, while an unhealthy body offers only an indirect and imperfect index of spiritual health. Death is not necessarily a failure, regardless of the age at which it strikes. But spiritual death or spiritual illness (as in the case of Boniface VIII) directly influences, and may even determine, physical well-being. This sounds confusing: if the soul is healthy and pure, why should that not guarantee physical soundness? And doesn’t the fact of final illness and death therefore imply something about one’s failed spiritual state?
What makes Arnau’s thought interesting is his insistence, here and elsewhere, that death itself is a natural phenomenon when it comes as the denouement of a lived-out existence and is in such a case morally neutral. Spiritual health, in other words, makes physical health essentially irrelevant; illness—unless it be the natural decline of bodily vigor at the close of a long life—may serve as a warning sign for individuals to engage in necessary spiritual regeneration. Christ, as the medicus supremus of all Creation, presents sickness to mankind as nothing so much as an opportunity for reform. But for those whose souls already exist in vigorous purity—like the Carthusians (and, by clear implication, Arnau’s much-favored Spiritual Franciscans, who also practiced austere physical self-denial)—bodily malaise, while a genuine suffering that deserves attention and treatment, cannot be simplistically equated with spiritual disease.
So what does this imply for the end of time? It’s hard to say, and Arnau himself never dared venture a guess. It seems likely, however, that he , expected the end to make physical soundness itself irrelevant even though the faithful may be assured of the resurrection of their bodies. Arnau seems far too implicated in a materialist understanding of human nature to posit anything like a literal rejuvenation of the dead—a miraculous return of the youthful, vigorous, and hale bodies of our early adulthood instead of the decrepit, worn-out things we leave on our deathbeds—which leaves us with the assumption, given all that went before, that Arnau presupposes that the physical state of the resurrected faithful is an irrelevance. He makes no claim to know the physical condition of the saved, although his understanding of the body as organic material suggests that he would dismiss the notion of youthful bodies being restored to those who died at great age. Bodies on that day may or may not be cleansed of illness or decay; the essential point is that the spiritual joy of the faithful will make such a question inconsequential. The joy of reunion with God will, if anything, make us unaware of our bodies—for who could turn their eyes away from the Lord in order to inspect their limbs? We cannot and will not know exactly what is going to happen on that day. But what a blessing God has given us, he concludes, in at least letting us know, via the encrypted messages in Scripture and Creation, when to expect that of which we cannot know what to expect.