Last Things

by Bynum, Caroline Walker; Freedman, Paul;

  17. Damien Sicard, La liturgie de la mort dans l’église latine des origines à la réforme carolingienne (Münster: Aschendorff, 1978); Frederick Paxton, Christianizing Death: The Creation of a Ritual Process in Early Medieval Europe (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990); Meghan McLaughlin, Consorting with Saints: Prayer for the Dead in Early Medieval France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994): Mary Catharine O’Connor, The Art of Dying Well: The Development of the Ars Moriendi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942); Kathleen Cohen, Metamorphosis of a Death Symbol: The Transi Tomb in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); Howard Montagu Colvin, Architecture and the After-Life (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991); Sybille Ebert-Schifferer and Theo Jülich, eds., Gottesfurcht und Höllenangst: Ein Lesebuch zur mittelalterlichen Kunst (Darmstadt: Hessisches Landesmuseum, 1993); and Barbara Harvey, Living and Dying in England, 1100–1540: The Monastic Experience (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).

  18. Aron Gurevich, “The Tale of Thorstein Goose-Pimples, the Underworld, and Icelandic Humour,” in Gurevich, Historical Anthropology, 116–21; Claude Carozzi, Le voyage de l’âme dans l’au-delà d’après la littérature latine (Ve–XIIIe siècle) (Rome: Ecole Française de Rome, 1994); Visions of Heaven and Hell Before Dante, ed. Eileen Gardiner (New York: Italica Press, 1989); Alison Morgan, Dante and the Medieval Other World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Peter Dinzelbacher, Vision und Visionsliteratur im Mittelalter (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1981); Ernst Benz, Die Vision: Erfahrungsformen und Bilderwelt (Stuttgart: Klett, 1969).

  19. Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang, Heaven: A History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988), 1–144; Jeffrey Burton Russell, A History of Heaven: The Singing Silence (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997); Alan Bernstein, The Formation of Hell: Death and Retribution in the Ancient and Early Christian Worlds (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993); Piero Camporesi, The Fear of Hell: Images of Damnation and Salvation in Early Modern Europe, trans. Lucinda Byatt (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991); Georges Minois, Histoire des enfers, Nouvelles Etudes Historiques (Paris: Fayard, 1991). The lead article of Time for March 24, 1997 dealt with heaven. For art historical images of both heaven and hell, see Robert Hughes, Heaven and Hell in Western Art (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968).

  20. Le Goff, Birth of Purgatory; idem, Your Money or Your Life: Economy and Religion in the Middle Ages, trans. Patricia Ranum (New York: Zone Books, 1988). The most important recent work on the beatific vision, another “Last Thing,” is Christian Trottman, La vision béatifique: des disputes scholastiques à son définition par Benôit XII, Bibliothèque des Ecoles Françaises d’Athènes et de Rome (Rome: Ecole Française de Rome, 1995).

  21. Barbara J. Newman, “On the Threshold of the Dead: Purgatory, Hell, and Religious Women,” in From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 108–36.

  22. McGinn, Visions of the End, argues that confidence in a coming millennial age was not necessarily correlated with social or political radicalism. On this point see also Ted Daniels, Millennialism: An International Bibliography (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Stephen D. O’Leary, Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric (New York and London: Garland, 1992).

  23. Rebillard’s emphasis on the changing attitudes toward sin would put this shift to the personal earlier than Aries. See Eric Rebillard, In hora mortis: évolution de la pastorale chrétienne de la mort au IVe et Ve siècle (Rome: Ecole Française de Rome, 1994).

  24. See for example Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, trans. Catharine Misrahi (New York: Fordham University Press, 1961), 65–86; Marie-Noël Bouchard, “La résurrection dans la spiritualité des premiers auteurs cisterciens,” Collectanea Cisterciensia 37 (1975): 114–29.

  25. See especially Richard Landes, “Lest the Millennium Be Fulfilled.”

  26. Cullman, Christ and Time; see also Immortality and Resurrection (above, note 1).

  27. Bynum, Resurrection of the Body, 21–114.

  28. See the essay by Anna Harrison in the present volume.

  29. On this understanding of eschatological body and place generally, see Bynum, Resurrection of the Body, 279–343.

  30. Alan Brinkley in a talk entitled “Imagining the Twentieth Century: Perspectives from Two Fins-de-Siècles,” given at Columbia University in April 1998, notes how much more dramatic were the expectations of a century ago in contrast with the more restrained cynicism of contemporary times.

  31. Lawrence Shainberg, Memories of Amnesia (New York: Paris Review Editions/British American Publishing, 1988); Nancy Weber, Broken-Hearted (New York: Dutton, 1989); Laurel Doud, This Body (Waltham, Mass.: Little Brown, 1998). For examples of such popular literature taken seriously by specialists in the philosophy of mind, see Peter A. French, ed., Philosophers in Wonderland: Philosophy and Psychical Research (St. Paul, Minn.: Llewellyn, 1975), Amelie O. Rorty, ed., The Identities of Persons (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), and Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett, eds., The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul (New York: Basic Books, 1981).

  32. Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying (New York: Macmillan, 1969).

  33. Frank J. Tipler, The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God, and the Resurrection of the Dead (New York: Doubleday, 1994).

  34. Toni Morrison, Beloved: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 1987).

  35. Caroline Bynum, “Why All the Fuss About the Body? A Medievalist’s Perspective,” Critical Inquiry 22 (Autumn 1995): 1–33, esp. 8–12.

  36. Carol Zaleski, Otherworld Journeys: Accounts of Near-Death Experiences in Medieval and Modern Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Jean-Claude Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). The complex and far from anodyne use of the ghost theme in Toni Morrison’s Beloved is the modern exception that proves the rule.

  37. Two recent treatments of contemporary attitudes are David Dempsey, The Way We Die: An Investigation of Death and Dying in America Today (New York: Macmillan, 1975) and Douglas J. Davies, Death, Ritual, and Belief: The Rhetoric of Funerary Rites (London: Cassell, 1997). For crosscultural comparison, see Frank E. Reynolds and Earle H. Waugh, eds., Religious Encounters with Death: Insights from the History and Anthropology of Religions (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977).

  Settling Scores: Eschatology in the Church of the Martyrs

  1. This essay is limited to discussion of the pre-Constantinian church, focusing on martyrs’ passions and essays by ecclesiastical writers c. 100–310, e.g., Justin, Tatian, Athenagoras, Clement, Origen, Minucius Felix, and Tertullian. As this essay stems from a larger project on martyrdom in the early church, the bibliography here is highly selective. Condensed notations will be used throughout for classical and medieval works. Abbreviations for sources are supplied by the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (Leipzig: Teubner, 1900–); Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, Greek-English Lexicon, rev. ed. Henry Stuart Jones and Roderick McKenzie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968; rep. 1990); G. W. H. Lampe, Greek Patristic Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964). Most texts used for this chapter can be found in the Corpus Christianorum Series latina (=CCL), in the Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum latinorum (=CSEL), in Herbert Musurillo, S.J., The Acts of the Christian Martyrs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972) (=ACM), and in the Sources Chrétiennes (=SC). The last thorough study of eschatology of the church of the martyrs is that of Leonard Atzberger, Geschichte der christlichen Eschatologie (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1896; rep. Graz, Austria, 1970). See also A. J. Vissler, “A Bird’s-Eye View of Ancient Christian Eschatology,” Numen 14 (1967): 4–22; Brian E. Daley, S.J., The Hope of the Early Church (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991); G. W. H. Lampe, “Early Patristic Eschatology,” Scottish Journal of Theology 2 (1953): 17–35; Frederick Grant, “Eschatology of the Second Century,” American Journal of Theology 21 (1919): 193–211; G. Plorovosky, “Eschatology in the Patristic Age,” Studia Patristica 2 (1957): 235–50; Henri Rondet, S.J., Fins de l’homme et fin du monde (Paris: Le Signe, Fayard, 1966); Marc van Uytfanghe, “Platonisme et eschatologie chrétienne: leur symbiose graduelle dans les passions et les panégyriques des martyrs et dans les biographies des martyrs spirituelles (IIe–VIe siècles),” in De Tertullien aux Mozarabes: antiquité tardive et christianisme ancien (IIIe–VIe), mélanges offerts à Jacques Fontaine, Collection des Etudes Augustiniennes, Séries Antiquité 132 (Paris: Institut d’Etudes Augustiniennes, 1992), 69–95.

  2. Tert. orat. 5.3 (CCL 1, 260). See Jaroslav Pelikan, “The Eschatology of Tertullian” CH 21 (1952): 108–22; also Victor Saxer, Mort, martyrs, reliques en Afrique chrétienne aux premiers siècles (Paris: Editions Beauchesne, 1980), 36–83.

  3. M. Justin 5.6 in Herbert Musurillo, The Acts of the Christian Martyrs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 52; hereafter ACM.

  4. M. Carp. 4.4 (ACM, 32); Tert. orat. 5.3 (CCL 1, 260).

  5. Tert. fug. 7.2 (CCL 2, 1145), Min. Fel. Oct. 35.3 (CSEL 6, 50). See Iren. haer. 5 (SC 153) (entire), which is devoted to the Apocalypse.

  6. Min. Fel. Oct. 37.1 (CSEL 2, 52).

  7. M. Poly. 9.2 (ACM, 8).

  8. M. Poly. 11.2 (ACM, 10). Of the extensive bibliography on hell and the beginnings of purgatory, see esp., Alan E. Bernstein, The Formation of Hell: Death and Retribution in the Ancient and Early Christian Worlds (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993); Jacques le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory’, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); A. Michel, “Feu de jugement,” Dictionnaire de théologie catholique (Paris: Letouzey et Ane, 1909–50), 5:2239–46; Henri Crouzel, “L’Hadés et la Géhenne selon Origène,” Gregorianum 59 (1978): 291–331; R. R. Atwell, “From Augustine to Gregory the Great: An Evaluation of the Emergence of the Doctrine of Purgatory,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 38 (1987): 173–86; Martha Himmelfarb, Tours of Hell: An Apocalyptic Form in Jewish and Christian Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983).

  9. M. Perp. 17.1 (ACM, 124); M. Perp. 18.8–9 (ACM, 126).

  10. Tert. adv. Marc. 5.13.3 (CCL 1, 702). For the sake of clarity, I follow the distinction between revelation, from the verb with its roots of discernment, and the final revelation, or apocalypse, and which entails a Last Judgment sifting the righteous from sinners and assigning them to appropriate fates. Eschatology is a more inclusive term, embracing the “Four Last Things”: death, judgment, heaven, and hell—the quality of life after death. See note 18.

  11. Tert. orat. 5.4 (CCL 1, 260).

  12. E. R. Dodds uses the terms rather too broadly to explain change in his classic, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965). A narrower usage may be justified by more specific definitions of thought patterns.

  13. This philotimocratic culture is the subject of Peter Brown’s The Making of Late Antiquity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978). Love of honor and the culture of competition is addressed also by T. P. Wiseman, “Competition and Cooperation,” in Roman Political Life, 90 B.C.–A.D. 69 (Exeter: University of Exeter, 1985), 3–19; Nathan Rosenstein, Imperatores Victi: Military Defeat and Aristocratic Competition in the Middle and Late Republic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Walter Ong, Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality and Consciousness (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981); Paul Plass, The Game of Death in Ancient Rome (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995). Carlin A. Barton examines honor in the nexus of competition; see Roman Honor: The Fire in the Bones (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming).

  14. A complementary “longue durée” perspective is supplied by Louis Dumont, “A Modified View of Our Origins: The Christian Beginnings of Modern Individualism,” in The Category of the Person, ed. Michael Carrithers, Steven Collins, and Steven Lukes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 93–122.

  15. Political aims were operative on both sides. Michel Foucault’s work has inspired a consideration of martyrdom as a public spectacle of celebrating the authority of the state and the values of the dominant class; see Kathleen Coleman, “Fatal Charades,” Journal of Roman Studies 80 (1990): 44–73; Dennis Potter, “Martyrdom and Spectacle,” in Theater and Society in the Classical World, ed. Ruth Scodel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993). Ritual elements of martyrdom are addressed by Philippe Buc, “Martyre et ritualité dans l’antiquité tardive,” Annales HSS 1 (1994): 63–118. For the juxtaposition of gladiator and martyr in the arena, see Carlin A. Barton, “Savage Miracles: The Redemption of Lost Honor in Roman Society and the Sacrament of the Gladiator and the Martyr,” Representations 45 (1994): 41–71.

  16. Of the extensive literature on the pagan criticism of Christianity, see especially Stephen Benko, “Pagan Criticism of Christianity During the First Two Centuries A.D.,” in Aufstieg und Niedergang der romischen Welt (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980), 23: 2: 1055–1118; idem, Pagan Rome and the Early Christians (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); Anthony Meredith, “Porphyry and Julian Against the Christians,” in Aufsteig und Niedergang der römischen Welt (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980), 23: 2: 1056–1149; Pierre de Labriolle, La réaction païenne: étude sur la polémique antichrétienne du Ier au VIe siècle (Paris: L’Artisan du Livre, 1950); Richard Walzer, Galen on Jews and Christians (London: Oxford University Press, 1949); Robert Wilken, Christians As the Romans Saw Them (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984). Apologists such as Minucius Felix (Africa, second or third century), Tatian (Rome, c.160), and Justin Martyr (Ephesus, c.100–165) sought tolerance and defended Christianity against fantastic accusations—cannibalism, midnight love feasts, and the worship of the priest’s virilia—but the very extravagance of these accusations was worrying; see Min. Fel. Oct. 9.2–7 (CSEL 2, 13–14). Christians were depicted as lower-class dregs hovering on the margins of social respectability: women, children, unskilled laborers, and hopeless slaves incapable of coherent thinking. A number of Christian beliefs were simply abhorrent to pagans who, to a greater or lesser degree, subscribed to a Platonic dualism that elevated the soul while considering body and physical matter lesser levels of existence. Consequently, the Incarnation of Christ was unthinkable, as was the resurrection of the body; even the creation of the world (rather than its eternity) implied a divine interest in the material that was by definition beneath the concerns of a “real god.” Two articles of Henry Chadwick illustrate the quality of pagan and Christian debate: “Origen, Celsus, and the Resurrection of the Body,” Harvard Theological Studies 41 (1948): 83–102, and “The Evidence of Christianity in the Apologetic of Origen,” Studia Patristica 2 (1957): 337–39.

  17. In this strategy, apologists argued that Christians “really” fulfilled the honorable values that Greeks had set as standards. With absolute proof of Christian claims postponed to the future, tolerance—at a minimum—was justified, and pagans should suspend disbelief. This however was difficult. According to Tertullian, pagans could not comprehend the magnanimity of Christ’s patience in dying for humanity and so rejected faith; but for Christians this patience was the rational foundation of their faith; see Tert. patient. 3.11 (CCL 1, 302). At issue for Christians vis-à-vis pagans were the nature of truth itself and the ability of human beings to find or demonstrate truth. Celsus, Galen, and later Julian were offended by the “novelties” of Christianity, and Marcus Aurelius and Lucian of Samosata were repelled by Christian histrionics and the lack of philosophical rigor among these “desperate” people. Christians were accused of superstitio: irrationality, fear, and sheer nonsense; see Denise Grodzynski, “Superstitio” Revue des Etudes Augustiniennes 76 (1974): 36–60; and Pfaff, art. “Superstitio” in Pauly Wissowa, Reallexikon 2, 7 (1931): 937–39.
Scholars believe that superstitio was one of the charges that led to the persecution of Christians; see W. H. C. Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church (New York: New York University Press, 1967), 122–23. Ironically, it is clear that pagan philosophers were similarly critical of their own cult beliefs as being irrational; cf. Harold W. Attridge, “The Philosophical Critique of Religion under the Early Empire,” Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt (Berlin: de Gruyter) 16, 1 (1978): 63–64. In essence, pagans argued that Christianity was based on undocumented and irrational beliefs. An Arab redaction of Galen of Peragmum is telling, asserting that Christians were “unable to follow any demonstrative argument consecutively”; cited by Benko, “Pagan Criticism,” 1099. To vindicate Christianity necessitated hard “proof” of these beliefs: this was the role of the martyr.

  18. The ideas of and change from the classical Greek sense of bearing witness (equivalent to the Latin testis); see Liddell and Scott, Greek-English Lexicon, rev. ed., ed. Henry Stuart Jones and Roderick McKenzie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 1081–82. Romans import the Greek /martyr for one who bears witness by death; cf. Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 1116. In patristic Greek the sense of witness has evolved to one who dies for the faith; see G. W. H. Lampe, A Greek Patristic Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 828–32. As Giuliana Lanta argues in “Confessione o professione? il dossier degli atti dei martiri,” the duty of the martyr was a more active profession of beliefs rather than passive confession; see L’aveu: antiquité et moyen âge (Rome: Ecole Française de Rome, 1986), 133–46. See esp. in The Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. Gerhard Kittel, trans. and ed. Geoffrey W. Browmily (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1965; rep. 1984), 4: 474–514. See also, Bernard McGinn, “Early Apocalypticism: The Ongoing Debate,” in The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature, ed. C. A. Patrides and Joseph Wittreich (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984)=Bernard McGinn, Apocalypticism in the Western Tradition (London: Variorum, 1994), 1; Morton Smith, “On the History of and in Apocalypticism in the Mediterranean World and the Near East, ed. David Hellholm (Tübingen: J.D.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1983), 10–30; Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, “The Phenomenon of Early Christian Apocalyptic: Some Reflections on Method,” ibid., 295–325; Lars Hartman, “Survey of the Problem of Apocalyptic Genre,” ibid., 329–44.