Medieval Afterlives
Medieval Christians believed in both the End of the World and the immortality of the soul. On the Day of Judgment ("Doomsday"), Jesus Christ would return to earth in glorious majesty, all accounts would be reckoned, all injustices exposed and dealt with, the dead would rise from their graves, and everything—even Time itself—would come to an end. Within the Gospels, Jesus often speaks of this as the advent of "the Kingdom of God" or even "the Kingdom of Heaven." Christ himself would now be sitting as Judge, separating the "wheat" from the "chaff" (Matthew 3:12) (or the "sheep" from the "goats" (Matthew 25:31-33)): the blessed from the damned. Bodies would be reunited with souls at that time, and would remain with them in their blessed (or damned) states for all eternity. The world as we know it would come to an end and a new world would be born. The Book of Apocalypse, which concludes the biblical narrative, tells of the signs and tribulations that would precede this Dies Irae or "Day of Wrath," as the famous thirteenth-century poem ascribed to Thomas of Celano memorably put it. The biblical account of the end of the world exercised a powerful hold on the medieval mind, and its imagery—fire and brimstone, the Beast, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the Lamb, the New Jerusalem—seeped into a multitude of different types of medieval art and writing. Beatus of Liébana, an eighth-century Spanish monk, wrote an extensive and oft-copied commentary on the Book of Apocalypse, and this further shaped ideas about the end of the world as medievals knew it. For the first few generations of Christians, inspired as they were by the world-shattering transformations they experienced in the wake of Jesus of Nazareth, the Day of Judgment was perceived as immanent; St Paul often writes as if it could happen at any time and several of Jesus' sayings and parables throughout the Gospels support such an idea. However, as time wore on, and the world didn't end ... and then still didn't end ... Christians began to alter their expectations. The triumphant Christianization of the Roman Empire in the fourth century made the idea of the world's ending even less pressing and more abstract. And so, over time, Christian notions about the spiritual future began to shift in focus. Concerns about the end of the world were channeled into a more vividly imagined sense of what kind of existence each individual soul would experience after the death of its physical body. Ideas about the Day of Judgment were not abandoned—indeed, there were resurgences in anxiety about the end of the world just before the year 800, again at the turn of the first millennium, and at other times of crisis. But they were augmented by developing concepts of the afterlife from the early Middle Ages on. |
Dies Irae |
The cornerstone of Christian belief throughout these changes remained the idea that body and soul would be reunited at the end of time. The souls of the deceased, whether destined to eternal blessedness or eternal damnation, would get their bodies back. Dante Alighieri highlights this idea at various points in his Divine Comedy (14th cent.), his poetic "pilgrimage" through the afterlife, from Hell to God: the souls of the damned in Hell anticipate even greater torments when reunited with their bodies at the end of time, while the blessed long for the pleasures of this spiritual-corporeal Gestalt in the blissful presence of the divine. Dante's poem brings into focus that when medieval believers typically thought about Heaven and Hell (and Purgatory), they tended to think of it both as the temporary afterlife where souls abide after the death of the body and as permanent "places" that re-embodied souls would occupy after the end of the world and for all eternity.
The Hebrew Bible itself presented a vaguely-referenced underworld known as Sheol ("the Pit"), not dissimilar to the underworld of the Sumerians, Babylonians, and ancient Greeks. There the shades of the dead led a meager, voiceless, anonymous, and utterly peripheral half-existence. As the psalmist writes, "who will give [God] thanks in the grave?" (Psalms 6:5). The God of the Old Testament throughout the history of Judaism, even into the first century, was a God whose concern was primarily the well-being of his faithful people in this life. The world of Judaism from which Christianity emerged nevertheless entertained a number of opinions about possible afterlives. Some Talmudic texts imagined the afterlife as a place of potential punishment for sins, even thinking of it as a "second death" for the wicked, and associating it with the valley of Gehenna near Jerusalem. One Jewish group of the Second Temple period, the Sadducees, may have disbelieved in the immortality of the soul altogether. In contrast, Pharisees, who eventually came to represent rabbinic Judaism as it is known today, believed both in the end of the world and in the resurrection of the bodies of the dead, drawing upon references from Isaiah, Daniel, Ezekiel, and some of the other Hebrew prophets.
In contrast to the rather inchoate Judaic underworld, the afterlife as conceived across the broader world of late Hellenism was far more vivid. The Zoroastrians of Persia, whose influence was felt throughout the Middle East and even into the Mediterranean world, believed in an afterlife of eternal punishment for the wicked and eternal bliss for the righteous. The Egyptian religion, as well as the many mystery cults it influenced throughout the Roman Empire, also related one's eternal state to the ethical disposition of one's life, and it described an afterlife of great detail and complexity. Perhaps most formative in the imaginations of many early Christians, however, was the paganism of ancient Rome, which posited an afterlife in which the souls of the dead persisted in their individual personalities and in which reward were meted out for the impressively good, and punishments for the excessively wicked. The literary text par excellence that detailed the Roman underworld was the sixth book of Vergil's Aeneid, which was an explicit influence on Dante's Inferno and a quiet but pervasive influence on the development of ideas about the afterlife throughout the Middle Ages. The medieval Christian view of the afterlife drew upon both Jewish and pagan traditions. Like certain strains of Judaism, it believed in the resurrection of the dead at the climax of history and in the union with the souls of the righteous with God. Like the various paganisms, it imagined an afterlife that punished the wicked and rewarded the good, a process enacted eternally in what could almost be described as the particular landscapes of Hell and Heaven.
For Christians in the Middle Ages, when a human being died, her or his soul, now detached from the body, somehow found its way either to Heaven or Hell. (After the twelfth century, a third option, Purgatory, emerged, a place in which the imperfectly penitent, which might well include most people, might be further tested or purified for eventual blessedness.) According to the fourth-century Visio Pauli (or Apocalypse of Paul) each soul has a personal angel who would report its deeds to God and submit it to judgement. According to some sources, St Peter and St Paul, or the Archangel Michael, would meet the newly deceased at the gates of Heaven. In Dante’s Purgatorio, it is told how the souls of the recently departed wend their way to the mouth of the Tiber River to await angelic transport to Purgatory. Sometimes the souls of the damned are described as sinking directly to Hell (as in Chaucer’s Friar’s Tale), dragged down by demons, or the souls of the good as ascending directly to Heaven, as is typical in stories of the martyrdoms of saints or in the Dormition of the Virgin Mary.
The earliest Christian thoughts about the nature of "the Kingdom of Heaven" were focused around the biblical image of the New Jerusalem, drawn from the Book of Apocalypse. It is, indeed, a vision of heaven coming to earth, encompassing and remaking the world:
"Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth have passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband; and I heard a loud voice from the throne saying 'Behold, the dwelling of God is with men. He will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away.' ..... And I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need to sun or moon to shine upon it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb." — Apocalypse 21:1-4, 22-23
It is difficult to know whether to read this account from the Book of Apocalypse as a literal description of what early Christians literally expected of life after the Day of Judgment or merely as a potent apocalyptic fantasia. Nonetheless, the imagery of the Book of Apocalypse outlived early Christian ideas about the imminent end of the world and shaped later medieval concepts of what "Heaven" might be like. As a number of medieval “visions” of the afterlife show, medieval Christians continued to think of Heaven as a place of light and involving the intimate, blissful presence of God. Drawing upon classical precedents, Heaven was often imagined as a kind of Christian Elysian Fields: fragrant with flowers, rich in blissful music, aglow with a glorious light. The biblical concept of a "heavenly city" also proved enduring, and flourished especially in the later Middle Ages as urbans centers began to blossom once more. The fourteenth-century Middle English poem Pearl, for instance, features a detailed vision of the heavenly city, describing the bejeweled sumptuousness of its gates, walls, and streets, and the luscious fruitfulness of its arbors. The twelfth-century Vision of Gottschalk described its stately mansions and well-ordered avenues. The thirteenth-century Pisan Gerardesca in her vision imagined Heaven like a city-state (like Pisa), rimmed with fortresses and with the New Jerusalem in the center.
Whether the setting was of paradisal fields or of a celestial city, the souls of the blessed themselves were depicted either as naked (a reversal of the effects of the Fall) or, more often, clad in white (a detail from the Book of Apocalpyse). Sometimes they wore golden crowns as well, or sat upon golden thrones, the poor and meek and virtuous of the earth transformed into a resplendent congregation of queens and kings. For some medieval artists and thinkers, the blessed dead were ageless; others imagined all the blessed to appear as they would have at age thirty-three (Christ’s age at his death). The popular Tundale’s Vision noted that the glorified bodies of the blessed shone with their own light, a point later treated with full theological gravitas by Thomas Aquinas. For Augustine and many others, Heaven meant a reunion with one’s friends and loved ones as well as with the God. Medieval Christians imagined the blessed as rejoicing in the Divine Presence and in one another’s company, sometimes side by side with the angels, sometimes singing wondrously harmonious songs of praise, sometimes bowing in worship before God, sometimes enjoying all the other imagined pleasures of a prelapsarian existence. Dante calls the life of the blessed a festa, a “party.” Many medieval descriptions of Heaven mention particular categor ies of the blessed: martyrs, virgins, the devout and virtuous, notable clergy (although medieval visions of the next world are also eager to depict fallen clergy as well). St Augustine in his City of God holds that in Paradise all blessed human souls, in the full presence of God, will be perfected in love, deepening even their human relationships far beyond what had been possible in the fallen mortal world. As in Jan Van Eyck’s remarkable Ghent Altarpiece, many of the blessed are still identifiable as individuals, each unique soul finding its place in its eternal contemplation of the love and light of God.
The paradisal visions of God himself are usually vaguer. When God is depicted anthropomorphically, medieval Christians took their cue from the opening chapters of Ezekiel, describing God seated upon a golden throne, flanked by cherubim and seraphim. Some medieval art depicts the Holy Trinity — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — seated together on three thrones, often in the later Middle Ages with a side throne on which the Virgin Mary is seated. Certain medieval visions describe the Throne of God, with only a light emanating from it that is too bright for a still mortal visionary to behold. Dante Alighieri in the final cantos of his Paradiso describes the final approach to God as a veritable fantasia of light, a light that grows more and more resplendent even as the pilgrim’s eyes adjust to the celestial glory; his ultimate vision is of the Godhead as a point of light, infinitely bright, and yet somehow radiating as well the face of a man (Christ) — the poet’s admirable attempt at capturing both the transcendent glory of God and the boundless humility of the Incarnation.
If the medieval mind comprehended Heaven primarily through allusive images and theological speculation, its vision of Hell was rather more concrete, alive with details of specific torments for the damned. The imagery of fire is especially prevalent, building on a few biblical precedents. In the early Apocalypse of Paul (fourth century), for instance, Heaven is reached by a bridge that passes over a river of fire, in which (good) angels torture the souls of the wicked. From the early Middle Ages, Hell was conceived of a place of darkness and pain, of stench, of screaming, of gnashing of teeth. Many manuscripts feature a picture of the “Hellmouth” — a demonic maw devouring the souls of the wicked. Medieval artists and authors seemed to especially revel in imagining the torments of the rich, powerful, and hypocritical; corrupt clergy, especially monks and bishops, were candidates for especially terrible punishments. By the High Middle Ages, visions of Hell began to more consistently imagine Hell as a subterranean realm and to differentiate the infernal landscape further: rivers of burning pitch, lakes of molten metal, fiery mountains, shadowy wildernesses, plains showered with brimstone, profusions of serpents and scorpions, bands of savage demons. The variety of torments likewise increased. The twelfth-century St Patrick’s Purgatory describes sinners suspended on iron chains over the flame, or hung out on iron hooks, or fixed to spits, or cast upon iron wheels with red-hot nails. Dante’s Inferno memorably depicts the lowest part of Hell as a vast plain of ice, the traitorous sinners there (including Satan) frozen into place into ice.
The later Middle Ages also saw the further categorization of types of sinners in Hell. While the earliest accounts deal in either large masses of undifferentiated sinners or in very broad types — the proud, the unchaste, the hypocrites — later medieval accounts of Hell proliferated in the assignment of different modes of punishment to different groups of sinners. In Tundale’s Vision, for example, the proud are punished in a sulfurous valley, the greedy are devoured by a gigantic beast, the fornicators tortured in their genitals before being chopped to pieces and gobbled up by rabid dogs. In Thurkill’s Vision (thirteenth century), various groups of sinners are forced to reenact their sins before a demonic audience. Thurkill describes the punishment of adulterers with particular vigor:
“An adulterer was now brought into the sight of the furious demons together with an adulteress, united together in foul contact. In the presence of all they repeated their disgraceful love-making and immodest gestures to their own confusion and amid the cursing of demons. Then, as if smitten with frenzy, they began to tear one another, changing the outward love … into cruelty and hatred. Their limbs were torn to pieces by the furious crowd all around them.”
Dante may not always outstrip his contemporaries in terms of such savage violence, but the punishments he devises in his Inferno always reveal penetrating psychological and theological insights about the nature of their respective sins. Dante’s suicides, for instance, have been transformed into trees, their disregard for their own personhood reflected in the loss of their very bodies. In Canto V of Inferno, the lustful are punished by being endlessly buffeted by winds, always almost within reach of the objects of their illicit affections. Dante’s overbearing Farinata, in life an Epicurean and a disbeliever in the afterlife or the resurrection of the dead, is ironically condemned to spend all eternity standing in a tomb.
As even this brief survey suggests, the torments of Hell occupied a vivid place in the medieval imagination. Surely, over the centuries, many a would-be sinner thought twice about committing vicious acts, chastened by thoughts of eternal damnation. And yet, the extremities of infernal torture also seemed, at some level, excessive for the vast majority of medieval Christians who were neither inveterate sinners or perfect saints. From as early as Augustine, there had been speculation about Limbo, a sort of “side room” of Hell that could house the souls of unbaptized infants and of the blessed Hebrew patriarchs and matriarchs before the coming of Christ. (Dante would include virtuous pagans in his version of Limbo.) But Limbo as a sort of theological stop-gap did little to mitigate the horrors of the living for the punishment of the damned. As early as the fourth-century Vision of Paul, the Apostle, beholding with empathy the torments of the damned, bursts into tears and begs God for mercy; in response to Paul’s prayers, God grants all sinners a respite from their punishment every Sunday. Tundale’s Vision includes the categories of the “not-very-bad” (who, pressed against a wall, endure wind and rain) and the “not very good” (who congregate around the Fountain of Life, awaiting the time when they will merit fellowship with the blessed in Heaven). The twelfth century was certainly the turning point in ideas about such middle categories of the dead, and the concept of Purgatory, an intermediate state or “middle kingdom” between Hell and heaven, was thus born.
Purgatory as a physical place in the universe was often conceived, especially in the medieval visions of the afterlife, as a precinct of Hell, or even as identical with Hell, with the difference being that its torments were experienced temporarily and not eternally. But by the thirteenth century, William of Auvergne was already speculating that Purgatory might be somewhere on earth, hence physically intermediate between the celestial paradise and the infernal underworld. Regardless of its location, Purgatory — true to its name — had a purifying or purgative function: the souls of the dead would purge their unrepented sins, submitting themselves to punishment in order to “work off” or “do time” for the offenses they had committed during life. The durations of these torments, which were usually as intense as, or even identical with, the torments of the damned, varied among medieval thinkers. According to account of the Monk of Evesham or Dante’s Purgatorio, the pains were of limited duration, proportional to the gravity and number of unrepented sins. But according to other sources, the “temporary Hell” of Purgatory would end only at the end of time itself, on the Day of Judgement when Christ would make a final winnowing of the blessed from the damned.
Purgatory was a most appealing theological doctrine, as it reconciled biblical expressions of God’s bounteous mercy toward sinners (Psalms 65:3, Proverbs 10:12, John 11:26, Apocalypse 22:14, etc.) with the many equally forceful statements of God’s justice. Thomas Aquinas offers a characteristically definitive summary of the issue:
“it is sufficiently clear that there is a Purgatory after this life. For if the debt of punishment is not paid in full after the stain of sin has been washed away by contrition , nor again are venial sins always removed when mortal sins are remitted, and if justice demands that sin be set in order by due punishment, it follows that one who after contrition for his fault and after being absolved, dies before making due satisfaction, is punished after this life.” — Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, App. II.1.1
In this view, Purgatory offers a route to salvation for all believers, for the countless people who in their lives failed to achieve perfection but whose crimes were likewise not of such gravity to merit eternal torment. Dante, again, clarifies further that the crucial difference between the damned and the saved lies in the orientation of their wills at the moment of death; even a habitual sinner pleading for God’s mercy with his dying breath, can merit passage through the purgatorial fire.
The Franciscan theologian Alexander of Hales (d. 1245) noted that “Few in number are those in the Church whose merits are sufficient that they need not pass through Purgatory.” His words reflect the emerging idea that, although images of hellish torment often dominated popular conceptions of the afterlife, the doctrine of Purgatory was expansive and offered hope. Elsewhere, Alexander notes that Purgatory, far from being a vestibule of Hell as had been earlier theorized, may instead be “the antechamber of Paradise” (as le Goff phrases it). He also emphasizes that a life lived in love — in acts of charity and in participation with the sacraments of the Church — can actually mitigate the debt of sin. On the one hand, this insight reveals the possibility of continuity between life on earth, with all its virtue and vice, pleasure and suffering, and life beyond death. There is an essential communion, in this model, between the living and the dead. The living, through their prayers, can help alleviate the sufferings of their loved ones in Purgatory. (And, theoretically, the souls of the departed can also pray for the living.) The Feast of All Souls’ Day, celebrated on November 2, enshrined this impulse of care for the dead as an important point in the Christian calendar.
On the other hand, if acts of love and participation in the sacraments can mitigate purgatorial punishment, then there was an opportunity for the Church to step into a more active role. Masses for the dead became more and more common in the later Middle Ages. And the doctrine of Purgatory emerged hand-in-hand with an increased emphasis on individual confession from the early thirteenth century on. Medieval Christians, confessing to a priest, were encouraged to meditate on their sins and sinful tendencies. Full expiation could be had by completing the sacrament of penance by some act of satisfaction proportionate to the sin: prayers, fasting, almsgiving, pilgrimage, etc. Satisfaction for sins committed could also be achieved by purchasing from some ecclesiastical authority an indulgence, usually in the form of a donation to some charitable work of the Church. This practice became increasingly common as a money economy reemerged in the later Middle Ages. Its potential for abuse is perhaps obvious, as it subtly encouraged both ecclesiastical avarice and penitential hypocrisy. Dante, Langland, Chaucer, and many others critiqued and satirized the use of indulgences, and, as the Middle Ages drew to an end, Erasmus, Thomas More, and Martin Luther would all likewise see the reliance on indulgences as a major failing of the Church. As the Protestant Reformation took hold in the sixteenth century, the rejection of indulgences led to a wholesale rejection of the doctrine of Purgatory as well, and thus a radical reorientation of the culture of Latin Christendom away from a sort of continuity and communion with the dead and toward a cleaner, if less fungible and less merciful, delineation between the province of the blessed and the province of the damned.
Further Reading
- Alexander of Hales, Summa Theologica (Collegium S. Bonaventurae, 1928)
- Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, 3 vol., trans. Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander (Anchor Books, 2002-2008)
- John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400-1700 (Oxford University Press, 1985)
- Eileen Gardiner, ed., Visions of Heaven and Hell Before Dante (Italica Press, 2008)
- Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (University of Chicago Press, 1986)
- Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang, Heaven: A History (Yale University Press, 2001)
- Rob Meens, Penance in Medieval Europe, 600-1200 (Cambridge University Press, 2014)
- Isabel Moreira, Heaven's Purge: Purgatory in Late Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2010)
- Alison Morgan, Dante and the Medieval Otherworld (Cambridge University Press, 1990)
- Marie de France, St Patrick's Purgatory: A Poem, trans. Michael J. Curley (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1993)
- The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript: Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron (University of Exeter Press, 2008)