Envisaging Heaven in the Middle Ages

Carolyn Muessig, Ad Putter, Carolyn Muessig, Ad Putter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134175734
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Envisaging Heaven in the Middle Ages deals with medieval notions of heaven in theological and mystical writings, in visions of the Otherworld, and in medieval art, poetry and music. It considers the influence of such notions in the secular literature of some of the greatest writers of the period including Chrétien de Troyes and Chaucer. The coherence and beauty of these notions make heaven one of the most impressive medieval 'cathedrals of the mind'.

With contributions from experts such as A.C. Spearing, Peter Meredith, Peter Dronke and Robin Kirkpatrick, this collection is essential reading for all those interested in medieval religion and culture.

Part I
Introduction

1 Envisaging heaven

An introduction

Carolyn Muessig and Ad Putter

The concept of heaven is broader than the theological tradition of heaven. The theological tradition is itself broader than abstract or academic theology, for it embraces not only formal theology but the life and thought of the entire community. Tradition is not repetition, but the transmission of a living reality, which must be renewed and rethought as the community develops.¹

Jeffrey Burton Russell’s words capture the expansive idea of heaven in the Middle Ages and its shifting shapes across different times and different cultures. Many religions have posited ‘heavens’ of some kind;² and even when we concentrate on a single religion, pre-reformation Christianity, and a single period, the Middle Ages, we discover that the idea of heaven in the Middle Ages was as varied as the people who wrote about it. There was no one heaven, but a polyphony of heavens. Furthermore, because ‘the reality’ of heaven was one based on speculation as well as fancy, medieval heavens were products both of ingenious thought and of creative wishful imagination.

The interest of the topic of heaven is duly reflected in the recent scholarship devoted to it. Because this scholarship forms the background of the new research collected in this volume, we begin with a brief survey of some important books that have appeared in the last two decades.

In Heaven: A History, Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang provided a groundbreaking study on the development of heaven from its semitic background to its decline in the modern era.³ The subtitle of their book emphasizes the authors’ central point: representations of heaven changed with the times. Perhaps the most important change to occur in the medieval period is the change from visions of heaven as garden (which is what the word ‘paradise’ originally meant) to visions of heaven as a walled city. Both ideas have precedents in the Bible – the garden in Genesis and the Song of Songs, the city in the Book of Revelation – but, as McDannell and Lang argue, the resurgence of cities in the twelfth century helped reinvigorate the conceit of heaven as a large city.

Jean Delumeau has taken a similar historicizing approach to the changing conceptions and meanings of paradise in his book Une Histoire du Paradis.⁴ Delumeau’s study traces paradise and its pre-Christian roots, the theological developments made by the church fathers and medieval theologians regarding the differences between the earthly and celestial paradises and the ‘loss’ of paradise in the writings of Emmanuel Kant (1724–1804) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). Delumeau followed this study with Mille ans de bonheur: Histoire du Paradis which has the same broad sweep as the first volume, but focuses rather on apocalyptic thought. In the medieval period, the beliefs and teachings of such groups as Joachimites, Lollards and Hussites, receive particular attention.⁵ Although McDannell and Lang’s analysis and Delumeau’s study present a general summary of the history of heaven and paradise, they are valuable in the understanding of the specific development of ideas about heaven in the Middle Ages.

Two recent studies of the development of heaven in Christian thought are Jeffrey Burton Russell’s A History of Heaven: The Singing Silence and Alister McGrath’s A Brief History of Heaven. Russell’s magisterial book presents many examples and concepts that were prevalent in the Middle Ages such as visions and their significance in revealing the mysteries of the afterlife, the use of poetry in expressing the inexpressible of the celestial abode and the experience of joy in the heavenly realm.⁶ Whereas Delumeau’s history often emphasizes the negative and apocalyptic aspects of the last things, Russell’s work highlights the positive function of heaven as the individual’s ultimate fulfilment. McGrath’s book focuses on a broad range of literature dating from the gospels to the songs of John Lennon. Looking at various themes of heaven such as ‘the city’, ‘the garden’, ‘atonement and paradise’, ‘signals of transcendence’, ‘the consolation of heaven’ and ‘heaven as the goal of the Christian life’, McGrath demonstrates the effectiveness of literature in expressing (however approximately) experiences of paradise, for he argues that unlike theological treatises, which lacked a suppleness of language owing to their systematic approach, imaginative literature allowed for a greater flexibility of expression.⁷

The essay collections The Iconography of Heaven, edited by Clifford Davidson, and Imagining Heaven in the Middle Ages, edited by J.S. Emerson and Hugh Feiss, present detailed studies of heaven in the late Middle Ages that are more tightly focused than the books so far mentioned.⁸ The Iconography of Heaven brings together seven essays which are mainly concerned with representations of heaven in the visual arts and the performing arts of drama and music.⁹ The contributors discuss some of the stereotypical sights, sounds and smells associated with heaven (light, song, the fragrance of flowers and so on) and the ways in which these ‘sensations’ were artificially produced for earthly audiences. Imagining Heaven in the Middle Ages contains eleven essays dealing with the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The book is broken down into three sections: ‘corporeality’, which discusses the bodily enjoyment of heaven and issues concerning the corporeal versus the incorporeal reality of paradise; ‘desire and fulfilment’, which considers the monastic idea of completion in heaven and how exactly this was experienced; the final section, ‘transcendence’, is devoted to the ultimate heavenly attainment of union with God and the limits of human language in describing that union. At the heart of the collection is the influential work of Caroline Walker Bynum’s The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336.¹⁰ Here Bynum brilliantly traced the development of personhood and wholeness of self in the resurrected body making clear the centrality of corporeality in medieval heaven.

More recently Bynum with Paul Freedman has edited Last Things: Death and the Apocalypse in the Middle Ages.¹¹ The eschatological subject and chronology of this book of collected essays is broad, incorporating examples from the early church to the fifteenth century as well as discussion of not only heaven but also death and the apocalypse. In regard to heaven this study clarifies the immediacy of heaven in the medieval mentality. In particular, Harvey Stahl’s article ‘The Place of the Elect in an Illuminated Book of Hours’, which examines numerous images of heaven in art, concludes that ‘the afterworld [. . .] was not shown consistently but it did move closer to earth’.¹² As illuminators made heaven look familiar, the ineffable and unrepresentable somehow became accessible and tangible.

Such accessibility indicates a desire on the part of the artist of these books and their owners to have some kind of concrete understanding of heaven. Indeed, the theme of heaven when applied to medieval culture emerges in almost every context as it was the anticipated fulfilment and much hoped for completion of the Christian life. An ever-present anticipation of heaven made thoughts of the afterlife a vital part of one’s daily existence. This explains the popularity of vision literature. Vision literature usually presented accounts of an individual’s experience of the afterlife (heaven, purgatory and hell); often these visions happened as part of a near-death experience.¹³ Scholarly interest in the genre is now such that we cannot attempt to survey the scholarship. Fortunately, however, Robert Easting’s study Visions of the Other World in Middle English provides an excellent bibliographical guide to this growing subject. The title might suggest the bibliography is limited to Middle English scholarship, but general studies and criticism and editions of analogous visions in other vernaculars and Latin are also represented. The wide circulation of many of these visions, as documented by Easting, is testimony to the interest and entertainment they provided to medieval audiences.¹⁴ Easting’s study builds on and complements the classic treatment of medieval vision literature, Peter Dinzelbacher’s Vision und Visionliteratur im Mittelalter.¹⁵ One of the many significant points in Dinzelbacher’s study is the change that occurred in vision literature in the early thirteenth century. In the twelfth century most visions were experienced by men and occurred once. In the thirteenth century, there was a shift with visions of the afterlife often being experienced by women and recurring on a regular basis.

The ideas raised in these studies on heaven are expanded and developed in the present collection. Envisaging Heaven in the Middle Ages deals with medieval notions of heaven in theological and mystical writings, in visions of the otherworld, in medieval drama, poetry and music, and in vernacular literature. In order to indicate the range of interests and approaches on offer, we have structured the book in four sections, each devoted to a different aspect of the theme of heaven. The first section addresses theological controversies as well as established traditions concerning heaven. The chapters in the second part of the book deal with mystical and visionary traditions of heaven, and discuss the search for heaven in the writings of medieval mystics and in visions of the otherworld. The third section considers representations of heaven in medieval poetry and drama. Putting heaven into verse or onto stage posed obvious challenges; this section shows how poets and performers took on and overcame these obstacles. The fourth and final section examines vernacular appropriations of the idea of heaven in a range of languages and idioms (Irish bardic poetry, Chaucer’s love poetry and medieval romance).

The theology of heaven

The nature of the actual experience of heaven was the focus of intense speculation and debate in the Middle Ages. Some in the tradition of John Chrysostom (d. 407) argued that when the blessed entered heaven they would not achieve a complete understanding of the divine for such comprehension would be beyond the human reach.¹⁶ Augustine viewed heaven as offering an unmediated intellectual understanding of God.¹⁷ Gregory the Great argued that God would be seen immediately after death essentially and naturally.¹⁸ These and other tensions and controversies prevailed in the West throughout the Middle Ages. At the centre of the debate was the question of how the individual interacted with the divine.

The relationship between God and the soul in heaven was a fraught topic in the later Middle Ages. Bernard McGinn’s chapter ‘Visio dei: seeing God in medieval theology and mysticism’ considers this relationship in heaven with an analysis of the differing concepts of the beatific vision. Pope John XXII (1316–1334) and Pope Benedict XII (1334–1342) each articulated concrete but opposite conclusions regarding the soul’s ability to gaze upon God. McGinn shows clearly and precisely how this thread of argumentation developed from Pope Innocent III (1198–1216) to Meister Eckhart (d. 1327/1328).

The fulfilment of the desire to be united to God drove the argument and passion behind the debate of the beatific vision. Jean LeClercq’s classic study of the monastic life, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, demonstrated how monks strove to achieve perfect understanding of self and God.¹⁹ This sentiment was also entrenched in the writings of Hildegard of Bingen. Beverly Kienzle in her chapter ‘Constructing heaven in Hildegard of Bingen’s Expositiones euangeliorum’, demonstrates that this desire for God is at the heart of Hildegard of Bingen’s theology of heaven. In the Expositiones, the monastic yearning for union with God finds expression in engineering and architectural motifs. Metaphors of building indicate the path to heaven, but, as Kienzle suggests, they also reveal Hildegard’s lived experience as she oversaw the building work at her own monastery Rupertsberg.

The monastic life, so Hildegard of Bingen or Bernard of Clairvaux would have argued, is the gateway to heaven. In this argument, heaven afforded privileged positions to those who had lived a life of monastic perfection. But there were conflicting views of who would gain access to heaven. Throughout the history of Christianity, some theologians argued that after a period of purification all individuals could be restored to perfection, regardless of their way of life. Even the greatest sinners would one day return to God; this theological belief is known as apocatastasis among the Greek Fathers. In the West this belief was declared an anathema: only those who found redemption within the sacramental church could enter heaven. Yet, as Peter Dronke shows in his chapter ‘The completeness of heaven’, apocatastasis was an attractive belief that continued to find advocates, for it was based on the idea (at once logical and beautiful) that heaven could only be perfected when all created things returned to it. Looking at an impressive breadth of material, from the New Testament to Dostoyevsky, Dronke shows that even in the medieval West some theologians retained elements of apocatastasis in their theological view of redemption.

Carolyn Muessig’s chapter ‘Heaven, earth and the angels: preaching paradise in the sermons of Jacques de Vitry’ uncovers a heaven that is militantly orthodox and designed to combat heretical views. Although heaven was the abode of God, the blessed and the angels, Jacques de Vitry reminds us that it was also the birthplace of discord and schism; in particular heaven was the region from which God had exiled the rebellious angels. His sermons demonstrate that heaven could be anything but peaceful; it could be viewed as a parallel universe which provided precedent for violent action against such groups as the Cathars.

Mystical and visionary traditions

As indicated above, the bodily resurrection was an expectation in Christian theology.²⁰ Such an expectation points to the logical conclusion that heaven was not only a notional reality but a physical place where all the blessed would reside. Much time was spent in trying to figure out where this heaven was located and how it was arranged. Many theologians perceived it to be above the earthly and heavenly firmaments.²¹ However, perceptions of heaven were often relayed not only through theological treatises but visionary literature. Such writings made heaven visible and tangible in the here and now, partly as an incentive to virtuous living on earth. As Robert Easting poi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Plates
• Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Part I Introduction
• Part II The theology of heaven
• Part III Mystical and visionary traditions
• Part IV The art of heaven
• Part V Vernacular appropriations