Meditating Death in Medieval and Early Modern Devotional Writing: From Bonaventure to Luther (Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture) 9780198861980, 0198861982

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Meditating Death in Medieval and Early Modern Devotional Writing

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Meditating Death in Medieval and Early Modern Devotional Writing From Bonaventure to Luther MARK CHINCA

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Mark Chinca 2020 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2020 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2019955810 ISBN 978–0–19–886198–0 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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OXFORD STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE AND CULTURE General Editors Ardis Butterfield and Christopher Cannon The monograph series Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture showcases the plurilingual and multicultural quality of medieval literature and actively seeks to promote research that not only focuses on the array of subjects medievalists now pursue—in literature, theology, and philosophy, in social, political, jurisprudential, and intellectual history, the history of art, and the history of science—but also that combines these subjects productively. It offers innovative studies on topics that may include, but are not limited to, manuscript and book history; languages and literatures of the global Middle Ages; race and the post-colonial; the digital humanities, media and performance; music; medicine; the history of affect and the emotions; the literature and practices of devotion; the theory and history of gender and sexuality, ecocriticism and the environment; theories of aesthetics; medievalism.

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Acknowledgments One of the pleasures of bringing a book to completion is that the time finally comes for the author to acknowledge the debts of gratitude accumulated along the way; my pleasure is all the greater for having so many friends, colleagues, institutions, and organizations to thank for the help and support without which this book would not have been finished. Ursula Peters and Stephen G. Nichols encouraged me to write it in the first place; Rita Copeland, Marian Hobson, Henrike Manuwald, and Christopher Young always listened and kept me going; Roger Paulin read every chapter fresh from the production line and so ensured that I made it to the end; Ardis Butterfield and Christopher Cannon, the general editors of Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture, were ready to offer the manuscript a home. I must also thank the anonymous readers for Oxford University Press for their careful and thoughtful reports; the book has been improved in innumerable respects as a result of their suggestions; shortcomings that remain are of course down to me alone. At the Press, Jacqueline Norton and Aimee Wright tended both the book and its author through every stage of the publication process with such charm, humor, and efficiency that it never once felt as if it was a process. An early version of Chapter 2 was published as “Out of this World: Metaphor and the Art of Dying Well in Laurent d’Orléans,” in Fiktion und Fiktionalität in den Literaturen des Mittelalters, ed. Ursula Peters and Rainer Warning (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2009), 433–50; a period of research leave funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council gave me time to complete a first draft of the book. Even in this era of digital humanities, it would have been impossible to do the research and writing without physically visiting libraries, and I owe a special debt of thanks to the staff of Cambridge University Library, the British Library, and the Warburg Institute Library for their unfailing help and kindness over the years. The D. H. Green Fund of the University of Cambridge generously assisted with a grant in aid of publication; how I wish that Dennis Green, my teacher, were alive still to read this book. During our weekly rambles over London’s heaths and commons and along its rivers and canals Sarah Kay and Gesine Manuwald let me try out ideas on them— solvitur ambulando—and contributed more through conversation and friendship than perhaps they realize.

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Contents List of Illustrations List of Abbreviations Note to the Reader

Introduction: Memorare novissima tua 1. Monastic Meditation Transformed: The Spiritual Exercises of Bonaventure 1. The regimen of the soul 2. The tools and the ladder 3. “Philosophy is the meditation of death” 4. “Turn the ray of contemplation”

xi xiii xv

1 15 15 20 38 57

2. Out of This World: Seeing the Afterlife in the Somme le Roi 1. A voyage out 2. Limit and horizon 3. Passage and partition 4. Words and pictures 5. Seeing and knowing 6. Proper and improper

66 66 73 79 83 93 103

3. Touching Eternity: The Practice of Death in Heinrich Seuse 1. Circumdederunt me gemitus mortis 2. Dead parchment and living heart 3. The inner senses 4. Script, seal, wrap, cast

109 109 120 134 142

4. Rewriting the Text of the Soul: In and Around the Devotio Moderna 1. Soul-work and text-work 2. Decompose and recompose 3. Iterate and multiply

154 154 161 184

5. Grace, Faith, Scripture, Spirit: Lutheran Transformations 1. “Enclose the scriptures in your heart” 2. Kairos 3. Hear and believe 4. A winding-sheet for the soul 5. “Learn a new language”

206 206 212 220 228 237

Conclusion: Last Things and First Philosophy Bibliography Index

253 263 291

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List of Illustrations 2.1. Last Judgment. Laurent d’Orléans, La Somme le Roi. Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine, Ms. 870 (dated 1295), fol. 44v. © Bibliothèque Mazarine.

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2.2. Last Judgment. Middle English translation of a mixed Somme-Miroir recension. The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, Ms. Bodl. 283 (late fifteenth century), fol. 87v.

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2.3. Last Judgment. Laurent d’Orléans, La Somme le Roi. St. John’s College, Cambridge, Ms. B 9 (second quarter of the fourteenth century), fol. 185v. By permission of the Master and Fellows of St. John’s College, Cambridge.

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2.4. Last Judgment. Laurent d’Orléans, La Somme le Roi. Brussels, KBR, Ms. 9550 (ca. 1400), fol. 21v. © KBR—Manuscripts—9550.

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2.5. Death defeating a king. Laurent d’Orléans, La Somme le Roi. St. John’s College, Cambridge, Ms. S 30 (early fourteenth century), fol. 64r. By permission of the Master and Fellows of St. John’s College, Cambridge.

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2.6. Death as horseman. William Caxton, Book Ryal, Westminster: Wynkyn de Worde, 1507, Sig. K1r. © The British Library Board, shelfmark C11a23.

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3.1. The servant with Christ on the cross. Heinrich Seuse, Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit. Strasbourg, Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire, Ms. 2929 (ca. 1370), fol. 109v. Coll. & photogr. BNU Strasbourg. Cliché CNRS—IRHT.

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 monogram. Heinrich Seuse, Vita. Strasbourg, Bibliothèque 3.2. The author’s IHC nationale et universitaire, Ms. 2929 (ca. 1370), fol. 7r. Coll. & photogr. BNU Strasbourg. Cliché CNRS—IRHT.

151

5.1. Death and sleeping child. Thomas Thanhöltzner, Sterbekunst, Görlitz: Ambrosius Fritsch, 1577, Sig. A[4]v. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, shelfmark Asc. 3975.

207

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List of Abbreviations ADB

AT CCCM CCSL CSEL DS DTC ESTC GW

ISTC LCI LCL LW NDB OGE PG PL SAO SBO SC VD16

Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie. Edited for the Historical Commission of the Bavarian Royal Academy of Sciences. 56 vols. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1875–1912. René Descartes. Œuvres. Edited by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery. 13 vols. Paris: Léopold Cerf, 1897–1913. Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis Corpus Christianorum Series Latina Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum Heinrich Seuse. Deutsche Schriften. Edited by Karl Bihlmeyer. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1907. Reprint, Frankfurt am Main: Minerva, 1961. Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique. Edited by Jean Michel Alfred Vacant and others. 30 vols. Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1902–50. English Short Title Catalogue. http://estc.bl.uk/F/?func=file&file_name=loginbl-estc. Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke. Vols. 1–8, pt. 1 edited by the Commission for the Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke. Leipzig: Hiersemann, 1925–40. Vols. 8– edited by the Deutsche Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin and the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin-Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz. Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1978–. https:// www.gesamtkatalogderwiegendrucke.de. Incunabula Short Title Catalogue. http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/istc/ Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie. Edited by Engelbert Kirschmann et al. 8 vols. Freiburg: Herder, 1968–76. Loeb Classical Library Luther’s Works. Edited by Jaroslav Pelikan and others. 55 vols. Philadelphia: Fortess Press; Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1955–. Neue Deutsche Biographie. Edited for the Historical Commission of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1955–. Ons Geestelijk Erf J. P. Migne. Patrologia Graeca. 161 vols. Paris: Imprimerie Catholique. 1857–66. J. P. Migne. Patrologia Latina. 217 vols. Paris: Imprimerie Catholique, 1841–55. Sancti Anselmi Cantuariensis Archiepiscopi Opera Omnia. Edited by Franciscus Salesius Schmitt. 6 vols. Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1946–61. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sancti Bernardi Opera, ed. Jean Leclercq and others. 8 vols. Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1957–77. Sources Chrétiennes Verzeichnis der im deutschsprachigen Bereich erschienenen Drucke des 16. Jahrhunderts. https://www.bsb-muenchen.de/kompetenzzentrenund-landesweite-dienste/kompetenzzentren/vd-16/.

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xiv VD17 VD18 VL WA

   Verzeichnis der im deutschsprachigen Bereich erschienenen Drucke des 17. Jahrhunderts. http://www.vd17.de. Verzeichnis deutscher Drucke des 18. Jahrhunderts. http://www.vd18.de. Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters: Verfasserlexikon. 2nd ed. Edited by Kurt Ruh et al. 14 vols. Berlin: de Gruyter: 1977–2008. D. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesammtausgabe. Edited by J. K. F. Knaake and others. 91 vols. Weimar: Hermann Böhlau, 1883–2009. Br = Briefe; TR = Tischreden.

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Note to the Reader As a general rule, English translations accompanying quotations from primary sources in other languages are cited from published translations, though often with modifications, usually in the direction of greater literalness; these changes have been made silently except when the resulting difference is substantial. The writings of Seuse and Luther are an exception to the rule. Here I have preferred my own translations to the published ones by Frank Tobin (Henry Suso: The Exemplar, with Two German Sermons, New York: Paulist Press, 1989) and Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann (eds., Luther’s Works, Philadelphia: Fortress Press; Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1955–86). References to these translations are nevertheless provided for the convenience of readers who may want to look up any quoted passage there. Bible quotations in English in Chapters 1 to 4 are from the Douay-Rheims translation; it has been possible to maintain the principle for the majority of cases in Chapter 5, because Luther and other Protestant writers continued to quote the Bible in the Latin of the Vulgate, and Luther’s German Bible often stays close to its text. I have however substituted the English of the Authorized Version whenever its text is a better match for Luther’s German; these substitutions are noted. Protestant writers sometimes used the Vulgate numbering of the Psalms, and sometimes the Hebrew (Masoretic) numbering; wherever the numbers diverge, I have given both, with the Vulgate number in parentheses.

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Introduction Memorare novissima tua

“How am I to live my life?” The question was asked out loud by a merchant in a morality play performed at Munich in the summer of 1510. His character, a sort of Everyman who stands for the whole class of people who make their living through worldly trades and callings, is seized with terror at the thought of the wrath and the eternal punishment that God metes out to sinners when they die. No sooner has he posed his question than a doctor of divinity steps up with the answer, quoting from the biblical Book of ben Sirach: “In all thy works remember thy last end, and thou shalt never sin” (Sir 7:40).¹ How to fulfill the requirements of this imperative is the subject of the pedagogical dialogue that then unfolds. To the merchant’s objection that he simply does not have time to be always thinking about his last end the theologian replies that it will be sufficient if, in his idle moments, when the danger of succumbing to temptation is greatest, he just remembers four things: death, judgment, purgatory, hell.² So that the merchant will not be without food for his spare-time meditations, the theologian next presents him with a sequence of “figures”—exemplary plays within the play— which illustrate the most important points of Christian dogma relating to each of these four eschatological themes. By regularly calling to mind what he has seen and heard, the merchant will (in the words of the messenger who introduces the dialogue to the play’s real-world spectators) “learn to die,” in other words keep on the strait and narrow path of doing good works and repenting his sins in this life so that he may be assured of his salvation in the next.³ A dozen or so years after the merchant trod the stage at Munich, and many hundreds of miles away, a real flesh-and-blood person was wrestling with exactly the same question. Ignatius Loyola’s crisis of faith and the experiences of divine illumination which enabled him to overcome it at Manresa in the early 1520s led him to devise the Spiritual Exercises, a sequence of meditations and contemplations designed to clear the mind of all distorting inclinations and perspectives so that a person might determine the future direction of her life without being influenced by

¹ Münchner Spiel vom sterbenden Menschen, ed. Bolte, lines 276, 283–4. ² Ibid., lines 286–372. ³ Ibid., line 263. For further discussion of the play and references to secondary literature, see Chinca, “Münchner Eigengerichtsspiel.” Meditating Death in Medieval and Early Modern Devotional Writing: From Bonaventure to Luther. Mark Chinca, Oxford University Press (2020). © Mark Chinca. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198861980.001.0001

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any other consideration than to do God’s will alone.⁴ One of the exercises is a “Meditation on Hell.” The instructions, intended for the use of “the person who gives to another the method and procedure for meditating or contemplating,” specify that it should be made every day, one hour before the evening meal, during the first week of a retreat timetabled in such a way as to allow the entire program of the Exercises to be completed in approximately thirty days. Exercitants are to spend a full hour on the meditation, then (this part is not mandatory) a further fifteen minutes reviewing the progress they have made. The method for the meditation is also prescribed, and follows the same pattern as for other exercises. After a preparatory prayer comes the “composition of place,” the act of imaginatively constructing the scene (here “the length, breadth, and depth of hell”) and placing oneself in it, followed by a further prayer for what the exercitant desires, “an interior sense of the pain suffered by the damned.” Next follows a series of “points” specifying for each of the five senses what aspect of hell is to be brought into evidence. The eyes of the imagination will see the fires and the souls inside them; its ears will hear the cries and blasphemies of the damned; smell scents the smoke, the sulfur, the filth, and the putrescence; taste perceives the flavor of the tears, the sadness, and the worm of conscience; touch feels the flames burning the souls. Finally, in a “colloquy” with Christ, the exercitant distills all of these sensations into a summary of her own situation—it is thanks only to divine grace that she has been preserved thus far from death and damnation—before ending with an Our Father. The purpose of the “Meditation on Hell,” indeed of all the regime of exercises for the first week, is to force awareness of one’s own sinfulness; this in turn brings the exercitant closer to the goal of freely desiring and choosing “only that which is more conducive to the end for which we are created,” which is “to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by means of doing this to save [our] souls.”⁵ Between the performance of the play and the devising of the Spiritual Exercises a high-ranking court official back in Germany was asking not how he should live his life in this world, but how to prepare for eternal life in the next. Markus Schart, a counselor in the service of Elector Frederick the Wise of Saxony, directed his question in the spring of 1519 to Martin Luther; the response came on November 1 of the same year with the publication of Luther’s famous Sermon on Preparing to Die.⁶ In that text, written before his excommunication from the Church of Rome and strikingly free from doctrinal polemic, Luther simultaneously acknowledged the authority of the biblical imperative to remember one’s last end while yet subjecting it to a rule of timeliness. During life, he argued, it is highly salutary for a person to meditate on death, hell, and sin, because such meditation leads to ⁴ General accounts of Ignatius’ conversion and the Spiritual Exercises are O’Malley, First Jesuits, 23–50; Maron, Ignatius von Loyola, 203–10; Feld, Ignatius Loyola, 40–73. ⁵ Ignatius, Exercitia spiritualia, sections 1–2, 4, 12, 23, 65–72, 77, ed. Calveras and Dalmases, 140–2, 144–6, 150, 164–6, 200–4, 208; Spiritual Exercises, trans. Ganss, 21–2, 24, 32, 46–7, 49. ⁶ On the background to the composition of the Sermon, see Reinis, Art of Dying, 48.

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repentance; when life is drawing to an end, however, and death is imminent, one should on no account bring these topics to mind: the danger is that they will become magnified out of all proportion and so terrify the dying person that she will lose faith and despair of God’s forgiveness. In place of these “untimely images,” as Luther calls them, the dying person should concentrate on the redemption-promising counterimages of life, heaven, and grace.⁷ What is new about Luther’s timeliness principle is not that it regulates the appropriateness of certain topics of eschatological meditation according to the life stage of the meditator: there were precedents for the belief that death and hell were not fitting topics for contemplation on the deathbed.⁸ The novelty lies in the explicitness with which Luther draws the consequences of the principle, spelling out how the very quality of meditation changes with the season. Done at the right time, meditating on death and hell is a way of heeding the teaching of scripture; done at the wrong time, it is to succumb to diabolical temptation, to a trick of the “evil spirit” who hopes thereby to gain possession of human souls.⁹ These three works, the Munich play, the Spiritual Exercises, and the Sermon on Preparing to Die, could hardly be more different in terms of genre, style, and argument; they are all nonetheless testimony to the same thing: the normative hold that was exerted over all of Latin Christendom on the eve of the Reformation by the maxim that the Vulgate Bible renders as “In omnibus operibus tuis memorare novissima tua, et in aeternum non peccabis” (literally “In all your works remember your last things [novissima is plural: “those things that are last”] and you shall never sin”).¹⁰ Regular meditation on death, judgment, purgatory, hell, and heaven—the ensemble of end-of-life and afterlife events and destinations to which modern theology applies the label “individual eschatology”¹¹—was universally regarded as an efficacious means for encouraging

⁷ Luther, Sermon von der Bereitung zum Sterben, sections 6–13, WA 2:686–91; Sermon on Preparing to Die, LW 42:101–7. ⁸ For example Heinrich Seuse, Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit 21, DS 286, lines 23–8; Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 274. ⁹ Luther, Sermon von der Bereitung zum Sterben, section 7, WA 2:687; Sermon on Preparing to Die, LW 42:102. ¹⁰ Latin novissima corresponds exactly to ta eschata in the Greek Septuagint translation of the Bible, which in turn translates Hebrew aharit, “the end part.” Ben Sira probably wanted his readers to be mindful of the inevitability of death; the extension of the maxim’s scope to include the destiny that awaits the dead once they enter the afterlife was a reinterpretation by Hellenistic Judaism. See Puech, “Ben Sira”; Marböck, “Gerechtigkeit Gottes,” 191–4; Marböck, Jesus Sirach, 133–4. ¹¹ Modern systematic theology distinguishes between “individual eschatology,” the fate of each single person after death, and “universal eschatology,” which is concerned with the destruction of the world at the end of time. On the spectrum of themes these terms comprise, and the word “eschatology” itself—a mid-seventeenth-century coinage made current by theology in the nineteenth—see DTC 5:456–7; Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche 3:859–80; Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 2:1542–79. Although medieval western Christianity lacked the word, its teachings and beliefs about the “last things” (as they were called) covered the same range of phenomena, from the resurrection and immortality of the individual person through to universal apocalypse; see Bynum and Freedman, “Introduction,” 5–10; Baun, “Last Things.”

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repentance and affirming the resolve to lead a moral life; alongside confession and the examination of conscience, it had become one of the cardinal techniques of the self, “those intentional and voluntary actions by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct, but also seek to transform themselves.”¹² Arguably, it was the most fundamental of these techniques, since belief in personal identity, the sine qua non of selfhood and moral agency, is nowhere more compellingly inculcated than in the constant mental rehearsal of the doctrine that every single person will survive physical annihilation by death and be required to give an account of her actions in this life before a tribunal that will determine punishment and reward in the next. Originally practiced by a spiritual elite living mainly in monastic communities, the technique spread in the wake of the so-called “pastoral revolution” of the thirteenth century to encompass a much broader section of Christian society, lay as well as clerical;¹³ the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century did not so much abolish the technique as refashion it into an instrument with which individual believers might constantly remind themselves of the availability of God’s saving grace. How the technique of remembering one’s last end, so central to the concept of Christian selfhood and Christian living, was elaborated, disseminated, and transformed over the long span of time between these two events is the subject of this book. “From Bonaventure to Luther” in the book’s subtitle delimits the period and names the two outstanding theologians who, at its beginning and its close, wrought epoch-making transformations on the technique of remembering the last end. In the second half of the thirteenth century, Bonaventure transformed an ascetic practice that had hitherto been the preserve of a monastic elite into a method capable of dissemination to a wider public. In order to devise his “regimen of the soul,” as he called it, Bonaventure transformed what Mary Carruthers has described as the “orthopraxis” of monastic meditation—its regulation by a largely implicit body of knowledge which “cannot . . . be set down in words” but “must best be learned by practicing, over and over again”¹⁴—into an explicitly articulated system of sequenced instructions for the meditator to follow. In so doing, he inaugurated a tradition of spiritual exercise which reaches all the way down to the Munich play and Ignatius Loyola. Both of them are concerned with the chronological duration of meditation: the play proposes the minimal program that the time-poor merchant can fit into his busy day; at the other end of the scale, Ignatius prescribes the week and time of day for making the exercise, even its duration

¹² Foucault, Use of Pleasure, 10. ¹³ For discussion of the “pastoral revolution,” set in train by the Third and Fourth Lateran Councils of 1179 and 1215 respectively, see Hamilton, “Bishops, Education, and Discipline.” The decrees of these Councils envisaged a more thorough education of the parochial clergy in the fundamentals of Christian doctrine, and imposed annual confession and communion attendance on the laity. ¹⁴ Carruthers, Craft, 1–2.

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counted in hours and minutes.¹⁵ Luther’s early sixteenth-century transformation relocated the practice of remembering the last end in an altogether different order of time: not the quantifiable duration of measured time, or chronos, but the quality of propitious time, or kairos. The Greek word, meaning “opportune time or moment,” underlies the distinction that Luther makes between the appropriateness of meditating on death, sin, and hell “in the time of life [yn der zeit des lebens],” and the inappropriateness of meditating on these same topics “at an inauspicious time [zu unzeit].”¹⁶ It is this notion of a propitious time for meditation that will be taken up by Lutheran devotional writers in the later sixteenth century. The time of life, they will argue, is a special “time of grace,” an opportunity to hear and believe the gospel’s message of salvation through faith in God’s grace, without any contribution from human deeds and efforts; the sense of living in this special time, when all that is required for salvation is that a person should believe, is sharpened by the recollection of one’s own finitude and end. Thus what counted for Protestants was not when in the day or week a person remembered her last things, or for how long: inordinate preoccupation with details like these would have the effect of consigning remembrance to the chronological time of human works, and works do not save. What mattered for Lutheran writers on remembering the last end was that the kairos, the moment of opportunity, should be recognized and seized. The two transformations, the Bonaventuran and the Lutheran, each brought about a fundamental shift in the function of textuality in the performance of meditation. Text had been essential to the remembrance of the last end from the very beginning of institutionalized Christian devotion in the Latin-speaking regions of Europe. Mary Carruthers’ pioneering study of monastic meditation in the centuries before Bonaventure, The Craft of Thought, has shown how the practice was grounded in the rhetorical arts of mnemotechnics and inventio on the one hand and in reading, prayer, and liturgy on the other.¹⁷ Ruminating upon a familiar verse from the Bible, a monk would recollect sense impressions and other bits of text he associated with the verse through previous reading and study, and through hearing it repeated in the liturgy; then he would use his rhetorical training to compose these items into new trains of thought, whose articulation made use of emotively charged imagery as well as words called up from memory. Textuality is here the stimulus to and the armature of a meditative process that ¹⁵ Ignatius additionally suggests a modified routine for persons who wish to make the exercises but cannot afford to devote thirty full days to them on account of their involvement in “public affairs or pressing occupations”; such people (who are rather like the merchant of the Munich play) should devote an hour and a half every day to the exercises for a total of nine days, the “Meditation on Hell” being made on each of the last three days; Exercitia Spiritualia, section 19, ed. Calveras and Dalmases, 158–60; Spiritual Exercises, trans. Ganss, 27–8. ¹⁶ Luther, Sermon von der Bereitung zum Sterben sections 7, 8, WA 2:687, 688; Sermon on Preparing to Die, LW 42:102, 103. ¹⁷ Carruthers, Craft, esp. chaps. 2, 3.

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was fundamentally open-ended: Hugh of St. Victor (ca. 1096–1141) stated in his great compendium of monastic knowledge and study, the Didascalicon, that “meditation takes its start from reading but is bound by none of reading’s rules or precepts.”¹⁸ With Bonaventure’s methodical regimens of spiritual exercise, the textuality of meditation acquired a new directive function and quality. Writing for an audience that comprised lay religious and tertiaries as well as university graduates—for an audience, in other words, that was culturally and educationally less homogeneous than the traditional monastic community—he found himself obliged to spell out the content and the form of meditation in written instructions. The result was what Barbara Newman has called “scripts” for spiritual exercise.¹⁹ Even those late medieval texts for meditation that do not consist of instructions for an exercise but are intended for repeated, immersive reading have the directive quality of a script, in the sense that their rhetoric, indeed their very rhythm and prosody, dictate the manner of their reception. With Luther the shift is from script to scripture. Although Bible text had always featured prominently in meditation on the last end, whether of the monastic or the scripted variety, in Protestant practice it was the only text. Bible verses, especially ones that reminded the meditator that her death is overcome in Christ’s death, and promised grace and eternal life in heaven to all who believe in him, were committed to memory or written down in commonplace and prayer books; they were even inscribed on walls and paintings and everyday objects, so that the domestic interior would be a prompt to its inhabitants to remember their last end. Text was thus a stimulus to reflection, as it had been in monastic practice. Yet the focus for the meditator was not the process of the reflection: to become absorbed in that would mean becoming absorbed in a human work unfolding in chronological time. Rather, the focus was to be held unswervingly on the text itself, on its status as the Word of God, and on its message for the meditator: seize the opportunity and believe in Christ as the resurrection and the life. Protestant text was always scripture, and scripture issued a demand. Textuality is not of course the sole constituent or determining factor of meditation. There are the psychological and epistemological theories that explained which cognitive faculties are engaged when the mind is meditating, and what status as knowledge meditative experience may lay claim to; there is also the explicit aim of meditative regimens to inculcate an emotional habitus—fear, desire, compunction, compassion—on their practitioners; finally, there are the institutional settings which conditioned the practice of meditation as well as the dissemination of its techniques. All of these aspects have been elucidated in the substantial body of scholarship that has accumulated over the past three decades, ¹⁸ Hugh of St. Victor, Didascalicon 3.10, ed. Buttimer, 59: “meditatio principium sumit a lectione, nullis tamen stringitur regulis aut praeceptis lectionis.” Trans. Taylor, 92. ¹⁹ Newman, “Medieval Visionary Culture,” 25–33.

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much of it concerned with medieval meditation on the life and passion of Christ and devotion to Christ’s mother Mary.²⁰ Michelle Karnes has performed a stunning recuperation of Aristotle’s concept of imagination to show how it was operationalized in medieval gospel meditations as a psychological faculty capable of discovering truth.²¹ Niklaus Largier has alerted us to the enduring importance of another psychological theory that ran alongside the Aristotelian-scholastic one of imagination: the theory of the inner or spiritual senses, descended from Origen and directed in medieval monastic meditation toward the construction of a virtual reality in which the divine is encountered outside of the normal psychological processes of perception and cognition.²² Sarah McNamer, characterizing texts for meditating on the passion as “mechanisms for the production of emotion” and “quite literally scripts for the performance of feeling,” has described how those scripts were designed to orchestrate the meditator’s compassion, and drawn attention to the intricate gender performances involved in requiring male meditators to feel an emotion that was “insistently gendered as feminine.”²³ M. B. Pranger focuses on the institution of the monastery, analyzing its enclosed space and distinctive rhythms of work, prayer, and study as the “protective living conditions” that sustained the meditations of Anselm and Bernard of Clairvaux, and explaining how the “monastic poetics” of these authors underwent alteration as a consequence of the spread of meditational practices to urban environments: in this process of “exile” (as Pranger terms it) the slow, ruminative mode of meditative reading that was “rooted in the immobility of a ritual lifestyle” was supplanted by a “technology of argumentation.”²⁴ Amy Appleford’s study of one urban setting, London, in the long fifteenth century from 1380 to 1540 is not so much concerned with the effects of diffusion beyond the monastery as it is with ways in which the “schooled awareness of mortality” was embedded in and contributed to “practices of cultural memory, institution building, and the government of the city”; in the urban polity, meditating on death connected the private with the public and the religious with the secular, because individuals who

²⁰ Studies with a focus on meditation on Christ’s life and passion are Bryan, Looking Inward, chap. 3; Karnes, Imagination; McNamer, Affective Meditation; Fulton, Judgment and Passion. For Marian devotion and meditation, see Rubin, Mother of God, chaps. 11, 20; Fulton Brown, Mary. ²¹ Karnes, Imagination; she discusses the theory and practice of imagination in Bonaventure, Langland, Nicholas Love, and the anonymous Prickynge of Love. ²² Largier, “Inner Senses—Outer Senses”; “Präsenzeffekte”; “Die Applikation der Sinne.” See also his remarkable Kunst des Begehrens, which traces the posterity of the Origenist theory of the inner senses in medieval mysticism, Counter-Reformation spirituality, eighteenth-century libertinage, the late nineteenth-century decadent movement, and surrealist cinema, with the aim of uncovering hidden continuities between religious asceticism on the one hand and movements of artistic decadence and aestheticism on the other. ²³ McNamer, Affective Meditation, 3, 12. Her discussion centers around John of Fécamp, Anselm, and the pseudo-Bonaventuran Meditationes vitae Christi in Latin, and Richard Rolle, Nicholas Love, and passion lyrics by Lydgate and others in English. ²⁴ Pranger, Artificiality, 8, 12–13, 235. Pranger insists that the word “exile” is used indifferently, without pejorative connotations: ibid., 13.

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reflected on their own mortality in their personal devotions were simultaneously forming themselves into ideal ethical actors in the domain of civic affairs.²⁵ In foregrounding the role of textuality in meditation, I am not seeking to demote the cognitive, epistemological, emotional, and institutional aspects to a less important status—far from it: they are indispensable for understanding how the words of the texts could ever have the effects that were claimed for them, and in the chapters that follow I will constantly be attending to the words in this wider context of the conditions of their efficacy. My reason for giving a special prominence to textuality is that I think it enables us to capture a further fundamental dimension of meditation that has tended to remain underilluminated so long as the main interest and investigative energies of scholars have been directed elsewhere. Barbara Newman, for example, to whom we owe the notion of a “scripted vision” procured by following the instructions of a text, is primarily concerned in the essay where she introduces that term with the debates surrounding the epistemic status of the visions that the scripts induced: in what sense did meditators of transcendence “see” anything, and what were the criteria for determining the authenticity of their experience?²⁶ Even Mary Carruthers’ now classic study The Book of Memory, and its companion volume The Craft of Thought, which together have revolutionized our understanding of the rhetorical foundations of medieval reading and meditation, put the emphasis on the processing and transformation of texts into memory or mental imagery, on how thinking with texts is conducted as a “painting in the mind” or “painting in the heart.”²⁷ Yet, as Nicole R. Rice has reminded us in her study of laypeople’s use of spiritual guides in late medieval England, the words on the page were instrumental in producing the cognitive effects, the affective dispositions, and the spiritual transformations that readers hoped to achieve by engaging with them; the guides and their contents deserve therefore to be considered in their quality as “textual formations of piety” (to adapt her phrase) which offered their users “written models of self-regulation and self-assertion.”²⁸ From the time of Bonaventure to the close of the sixteenth century, textuality was implicated in the practice of remembering the last end in multiple ways. Text, read from the page or recalled from memory, provided the material for making meditations. The knowledge of how to meditate was transmitted textually: even the Munich play, which used the medium of the stage to put its message across, was adapted and reprinted as an illustrated quarto booklet for the instruction and

²⁵ Appleford, Learning to Die, 1, 218–22. ²⁶ Newman, “Medieval Visionary Culture.” ²⁷ Carruthers, Memory, 12, 221–42; Carruthers, Craft, 3–4, 116–70. ²⁸ Rice, Lay Piety, ix, x, 11–16. Rice’s actual phrase, which fits the focus of her study, is “textual formations of lay piety,” but the concept is generalizable to devotional texts used by all classes of reader in the Middle Ages.

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edification of readers.²⁹ Written texts were the scripts for meditation: they prompted it, directed it, provided the focus for it. Some of them even enrolled their readers in further, metaphorical text production, by instructing them to write the words of the text in their hearts, or imprint them there, or lay out the “exemplar”—the pattern, but also the textual copy—of the exercises in their hearts. By focusing attention on the textuality of meditation in all its different aspects we therefore stand to gain a better understanding of remembering the last end as a text-sustained and text-led activity; we can also appreciate more fully how the literal textuality of instructions and materials for meditation could work in alliance with certain culturally prevalent metaphors of self-transformation which were themselves derived from the field of textuality in order to secure abiding effects of spiritual growth and moral change in the meditator. The texts for remembering the last end whose contents, epistemological postulates, rhetorical construction, and intended effects are the focus of this book are both Latin and vernacular; they were written in France, Germany, and the Low Countries, but had an influence that extended well beyond these regions. Some of the authors, such as Bonaventure, Seuse (Suso), and Luther, require no case for their importance to be made; others, for example Gerard Zerbolt van Zutphen (1367–1398), Gerard van Vliederhoven (ca. 1340–ca. 1402), and Martin Moller (1547–1606), are unknown today except to specialists, even though their works were disseminated all over western Europe in the period with which the book concerns itself; Moller’s Lutheran manual on preparing to die even made it to the New World, where it was printed for the German-speaking community in Pennsylvania in the early nineteenth century.³⁰ Chapter 1, “Monastic Meditation Transformed,” is about Bonaventure, the seminal figure in the development of methodical systems of meditation and spiritual exercise. By presenting Bonaventure as a transformer of existing ascetic traditions, the chapter also serves as an introduction to the earlier monastic background and its formative texts and writers, from the Benedictine Rule in the sixth century through to Jean of Fécamp, Anselm, Bernard of Clairvaux, and others in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The focus is on two of Bonaventure’s treatises, De triplici via (The Threefold Way) and the Soliloquium de quatuor mentalibus exercitiis (Soliloquium on the Four Spiritual Exercises), which (if the number of surviving manuscripts is anything to go by) enjoyed far greater popularity in the Middle Ages than either of the two works of mystical theology

²⁹ This is the sole form in which the play has come down to us; see Chinca, “Münchner Eigengerichtsspiel,” 218–20. ³⁰ Martin Moller, Anweisung zum Christlichen Leben und seligen Sterben, Lebanon, PA: Jacob Schnee, 1808. The title is a simplification of the original: Manuale de praeparatione ad mortem: Heilsame und sehr nützliche Betrachtung wie ein Christenmensch aus Gottes Wort soll lernen Christlich leben und seliglich sterben. Despite the Latin main title, the whole work was written in German.

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that are better known to Bonaventure scholars today, the Lignum vitae (Tree of Life) and the Itinerarium mentis in Deum (Soul’s Journey into God). Bonaventure’s transformation of monastic orthopraxis is elucidated along three axes. The first is that of key metaphors which reveal a changed conception of the kind of activity that remembering the last end is considered to be. Both the Benedictine Rule and Bonaventure deploy metaphors of steps on a ladder, but whereas in the former they connote an activity carried on as a craft in the “workshop” of the monastery, with the latter they refer to precisely defined stages in the orderly application of a method, which moreover is not explicitly rooted in any specific milieu or form of life. The second axis concerns the philosophical and epistemological basis for meditation. Early monasticism adopted the Platonic definition of philosophy as the “meditation” or “practice of death” (Gk meletē thanatou, Latinized as meditatio mortis) as a general description of a way of life grounded in selfmortification; for Bonaventure, who encountered philosophy as an academic discipline taught in the university, it was no longer a name for an ascetic lifestyle but an Aristotelian science which provided meditation with technical categories and procedures; the exercise of philosophical reason was incorporated into an ordered cognitive process which had the potential to reach all the way to the contemplation of transcendent truths and reality. The third and final axis relates to the function of textuality, more specifically to the relationship between text and meditator. One of the most successful collections of meditative texts of the late eleventh century, Anselm’s Prayers and Meditations, tells its readers they should not trouble to read the whole of any text, but only as much as they choose or find useful for stirring up their spirits to prayer and meditation.³¹ The text thus puts its readers in charge, on the assumption that they possess the requisite education and acculturation to sustain their own meditations. Bonaventure knew the Prayers and Meditations, and even quoted them in his Soliloquium, yet the contrast between their programmatic directionlessness and his equally programmatic directedness could not be greater: readers of the Soliloquium are obliged to carry out the whole suite of exercises, from beginning to end, turning their minds from one eschatological topic to the next in the exact order prescribed by the text. Chapter 2, “Out of This World,” discusses the earliest vernacular regimen for remembering the last end, included in a French compendium of moral theology for laypeople entitled the “Treatise on Virtues.” In the version of the Somme le Roi by Friar Laurent (1279) it was translated into just about every other western European vernacular. Readers of the “Treatise” are exhorted to “learn to die” in a daily exercise in which they imagine themselves dead and send their disembodied souls on a tour of the otherworld regions of heaven, hell, and purgatory. There, they are told, they will see how sin is punished and virtue rewarded in the next life, and from this

³¹. Anselm, Orationes sive meditationes prologus, SAO 3:3; Prayers and Meditations, trans. Ward, 89.

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imaginary vision they will acquire the knowledge of “how to live well and die well.” The exercise confronts its users with two problems. The epistemological problem is how to authenticate the percepts of imaginary seeing so that certain and reliable knowledge may be extracted from them; the warrant of authenticity is provided by Augustine’s theory, described in his commentary On the Literal Meaning of Genesis, of corporeal, spiritual, and intellectual vision. The other problem is how to get from reading words on the page to seeing images in the mind. Here, the text relies on metaphor and its ability to jolt readers out of their habitual frameworks of perception and interpretation: by asserting that death is a stream, a gate, a wall, and so on, the text encourages readers to picture the physically traversable world in which the metaphorical predicates are literally true and to locate themselves imaginatively within it. The pictorializing function of the textual metaphors is moreover in a complex relation with the illustration program that accompanied the text of the Somme from the earliest phase of its manuscript transmission; the chapter discusses how variant realizations of the program result in illustrations that supplement the mental imagery generated by the metaphors of the text, as well as reinforce and amplify effects of the text’s rhetoric. These effects comprise not simply a meditative seeing of the last things “in thought” and “in desire,” as the “Treatise” calls it; they also produce a change in the meditator’s attitude toward this world and the language she uses to describe it, because the daily excursion into eternal life will reveal to her that the good things of this life that she ordinarily designates by words such as “joy,” “richness,” and “honor” are actually vanities that it would be more appropriate to call by the names of “torment,” “dung,” and “ignominy”; indeed, life itself would be more aptly referred to as “death.” Chapter 3, “Touching Eternity,” is about another vernacular scheme of meditation, the “Learn to Die” dialogues in the Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit (Little Book of Eternal Wisdom; ca. 1330) by Heinrich Seuse (Suso). The dialogues, conducted by a meditator with his mentor Eternal Wisdom on the one hand, and with a dying man on the other, had a reach and an influence far beyond German-speaking lands, thanks to Seuse’s own Latin translation of the Büchlein, the Horologium Sapientiae, and to the numerous translations into other vernacular languages that were made from it. Seuse’s text orchestrates a meditative experience of the last things that explodes the categories of reason and logic and is, in his own word, enphintlich: “sensible” or “feeling.” The chapter explores the way in which Seuse’s writing procures this effect of feeling, through its complex metaphors, its sudden shifts of perspective, and its embrace of paradox and alogism. Key among the metaphors are two commands issued to the meditator by his interlocutors: “Open your inner senses,” and “Write my words in your heart.” The first appeals to Origen’s theory of the inner senses, which was developed by Bonaventure into the notion of a “spiritual touch” (tactus spiritualis) which brings the soul into immediate contact with God; the second, originally from the Old Testament, envisages a process whereby the words that emanate

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from Eternal Wisdom or from the dying man become tactile experience for the meditator who listens to them. The heart of the meditator feels the touch of the writing stylus, and at the point of that touch, it becomes impossible to distinguish what is outside of the self, acting upon it, from what is inside, receiving the agent’s impression. Making the words enphintlich, feeling their touch as one meditates, is experienced as a dissolution of the boundary between inside and outside, passive and active, self and other; it is meditatio mortis in the fullest meaning of the word meditatio: a preparatory “practice” or “rehearsal” of dying achieved through the virtual dissolution of the self. The metaphor of the book of the heart features prominently in Chapter 4, “Rewriting the Text of the Soul.” Its focus is on the innovations in textually directed meditation on the last things that emerged in and around the Devotio Moderna movement in the late fourteenth century. The adherents of Devotio Moderna practiced a radically text-centered piety, in which working with text— reading it, copying it—was considered tantamount to working on the soul so as to bring it into a more perfect alignment with God. The efficacy of this regimen relied on a metaphorical equivalence between the human individual and a book: Devotio Moderna writers regularly described the heart or the life of the believer as a book whose text, like that of a literal book, could be edited and rewritten in a new and better order. This equivalence was exploited in a group of treatises that subject the remembrance of the last end to an especially intense regulation by processes of textuality. The works in question are the Libellus (Little book) named for its incipit “Omnes inquit artes” and the Tractatulus devotus (Little treatise for the devout), both by Florens Radewijns (d. 1400), one of the chief organizers of the early Devotio Moderna; the Tractatus devotus de reformacione virium anime (Devout treatise on the reformation of the powers of the soul) and De spiritualibus ascensionibus (Spiritual Ascents), by his pupil Gerard Zerbolt van Zutphen (1367–1398); and the Cordiale, seu quatuor novissima (Cordial, or four last things), attributed to Gerard van Vliederhoven (ca. 1340–ca. 1402). Although the latter work was authored outside the Devotio Moderna movement, its early circulation was in Devout communities, from where it went on to become one of the most widely disseminated meditations on the last things in the medieval West. All five works are founded on a common principle: they require the reader to implement their meditative program by repeating one of the operations by which they were constituted as text in the first place. In the case of Florens Radewijns and Gerard Zerbolt, that operation is the compositional one of compilation: just as the text has been put together out of excerpts compiled from other authorities, so the meditation consists in extracting “points” for consideration and recombining them according to one’s own plan. With the Cordiale, the operation is the rhetorical principle of repetition. The discourse of the text consists of rhetorical sententiae and exempla which are repeated over and over; the reader repeats the repetitions in her own meditative realization of the text, in this way fulfilling the

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injunction, issued in the work’s prologue, to “imprint the recollection of the last things on your heart.” The Lutheran transformation of the technique of remembering the last end is the subject of Chapter 5. The keywords of its title, “Grace, Faith, Scripture, Spirit,” encapsulate core principles of Luther’s theology whose implications for devotional practice only became systematized after the middle of the sixteenth century, when Lutheranism consolidated into an orthodoxy with its confessionally distinctive doctrines, institutions, and literature. The chapter examines the prolific quantity of writings on death and the afterlife that Lutheran authors produced in the second half of the sixteenth century, and argues that the constitutive presuppositions of their discourse came to be centered on four of Luther’s famous sola principles. The sola gratia principle, which asserted that humanity’s redemption is a gift from God bestowed “by grace alone,” gave a new prominence among the last things to death, since it was through acknowledging the fact of her own finitude that a person came to realize that the present time was the kairos, the “time of grace” in which salvation is freely available to all believers. Sola fide, the tenet that the individual sinner is justified “by faith alone” and that good works contribute nothing to the process, meant that elaborate regimes of spiritual exercise of the kind followed by Ignatius Loyola and the Jesuits were regarded with deep suspicion by Lutherans, since exercise could easily become a selfjustifying work. Sola scriptura held that “scripture alone” was the authoritative guide for faith, and that it required only to be heard and believed; the devotional performances that constituted remembrance of the last end accordingly became reduced to the simple hearing and believing of God’s Word. Solo spiritu, finally, taught that the message of the Word was made effective “by the Spirit alone”; Lutheran believers reflecting on their last end were enjoined to let the Spirit enter their hearts and minds, inspire their thoughts and deeds, and take over their language, as they learned to replace their habitual words for death with the vocabulary that the Spirit uses in the Bible. Referring to death in their everyday discourse as a “sleep” or “repose” from which the faithful will awake to eternal life would become the surest sign among Lutherans that the last end had been remembered correctly. Remembering the last end continued to be an important focus of religious devotion and self-discipline in the confessionalized religious cultures that emerged in early modern Europe as a consequence of the Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation. The reason for ending the story at the close of the sixteenth century, when in principle it could be pursued into the seventeenth and even the eighteenth, is that between the 1580s and 1640s a change occurred in the temper of philosophical reflection on death and the last things which resulted in a reconfiguration of the discursive environment in which meditation was conducted. Accordingly, the book concludes with a brief look at writings by Montaigne, Bacon, and Descartes. In essays by the first two we see a distinction

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being drawn, implicitly or explicitly, between religious meditation on death on the one hand and philosophical speculation about it on the other; the latter, drawing on the heritage of Epicurean and Stoic thought, tends toward making death into an object of unconcern, whereas for Christian believers it was among the things they should be most concerned about. In Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy the disconnection is between the claim that the author makes for his philosophy—it will, he contends, persuade unbelievers of the certainty of eternal punishment or reward in the afterlife³²—and what it actually demonstrates, which is (supposing the arguments are accepted) at most some of the elementary preconditions for those eschatological beliefs. Thus, in their different ways, all three writers contributed to a new pluralism of discourse surrounding death and the afterlife, one moreover where the old assumption, implanted in the western intellectual tradition by monasticism and reconstituted on the basis of an epistemological theory by Bonaventure, that religious remembrance of the last end was coterminous or at least continuous with the exercise of philosophical reason lost its claim to self-evidence.

³² Descartes, Meditationes de prima philosophia, dedicatory letter, AT 7:1–2; trans. Cottingham, Writings 2:3.

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1 Monastic Meditation Transformed The Spiritual Exercises of Bonaventure

1. The regimen of the soul De regimine animae (On Governing the Soul) is the title of a little devotional treatise written by Bonaventure (ca. 1217–1274) for Blanche of France, one of the daughters of Saint Louis, between 1264 and 1274. A mere ten paragraphs long, it offers a complete program of spiritual exercise for the good governance of the soul: how the soul is to feel God, through faith, meditation, and contemplation; how it is to consider God’s law with the eyes of the mind, and conduct a thorough self-examination to see if it has always exhibited the humility, the devotion, and the untaintedness that the law requires; finally, how it is to maintain the resulting attitude of contrition by cultivating the virtues of modesty, justice, and piety. Within this compact scheme, the last things—specifically the last judgment, the darkness, fire and torments of hell, and the prospect of seeing God face to face in heaven—feature as a spur to contrition, filling the soul with a dread of losing God through everlasting punishment on the one hand and a burning desire to be with God in eternity on the other.¹ De regimine is the shortest of three texts by Bonaventure in which remembrance of the last end is thoroughly incorporated into a complete technique for transforming the self through a regimen of meditation and disciplined habituation in the virtues. The two others are the Soliloquium de quatuor mentalibus exercitiis (Soliloquium on the Four Spiritual Exercises) and De triplici via (The Threefold Way), also known by the alternative title Incendium amoris (On Enkindling Love). Both of these guides to spiritual exercise were written some time after 1257, when Bonaventure was elected minister general of the Franciscan order.² Although they say nothing specific about who they were written for, they must have been intended initially for a public in the various branches of the Franciscan organization: friars of the so-called First Order, nuns in the Second Order of the Poor Clares, and clergy and laypeople organized in the regular and secular divisions of ¹ Bonaventure, De regimine animae, esp. 5, 7, Opera omnia 8:129–30; On Governing the Soul, trans. Etzkorn, 204–6. For the authenticity of the work and its connection with Blanche of France, see the editorial prolegomena in Opera omnia 8:lix–lx; Distelbrink, Bonaventurae scripta, 21; Bougerol, Introduction, 161. ² On this period of Bonaventure’s career, see Monti, “Minister General.” Meditating Death in Medieval and Early Modern Devotional Writing: From Bonaventure to Luther. Mark Chinca, Oxford University Press (2020). © Mark Chinca. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198861980.001.0001

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the Third Order.³ By the later Middle Ages, however, the two works were reaching a readership far beyond the Franciscan movement.⁴ Over 300 Latin manuscripts of De triplici via and more than 250 of Soliloquium survive, the majority of them from the fifteenth century, as well as numerous early printed editions.⁵ The reception of these works was especially intense in Germany and the Low Countries, which also produced multiple vernacular translations of both De triplici via and the Soliloquium.⁶ Bonaventure’s systematic regimens provided the template for the spiritual exercises of the Devotio Moderna, the text-centered practice of piety that emerged in the Low Countries in the late fourteenth century;⁷ they were also a formative influence on García de Cisneros (1455–1510), the abbot of Monserrat whose Exercitatorio de la vida espiritual (Book of Exercises for the Spiritual Life) was one of the models for Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises.⁸ “Regimen of the soul” and “spiritual exercise” are Bonaventure’s names for the generic activity under which remembering the last end falls. The idea that they express, that the soul should be subject to discipline and training, was not however his invention. The origins of spiritual exercise lay in ancient medicine and philosophy; in these discourses, the Greek words askēsis, “exercise, training,” epilogismos, “reflection,” and ethismos, “habituation” referred to a range of therapeutic and ascetic practices, such as self-examination, meditation, and the cultivation of mental vigilance, whose purpose was to change individual subjects’ perceptions of reality, of themselves and their place in the world, and to do this moreover in such a way that they begin to live according to the logos, the universal and immutable laws of reason, rather than continue to be enslaved and made

³ For the organizational divisions of the Franciscan order in the thirteenth century, see Moorman, History of the Franciscan Order, chaps. 3–5, 18, 19. ⁴ Only two other works by Bonaventure attained this degree of popularity and influence in the Middle Ages: the Breviloquium and the Itinerarium mentis in Deum; on these, see Schlosser, “Life and Works,” 24–6, 32–4, 55–9. ⁵ The Quaracchi editors of Bonaventure’s complete works knew of 299 Latin manuscripts of De triplici via and 257 of the Soliloquium, compared with just 13 of De regimine animae; around three fifths of the manuscripts of De triplici via and four fifths of those of the Soliloquium are dated by the editors to the fifteenth century; see Opera omnia 8:x–xxv, xxvi–xxxviii, lix–lx. Since the Quaracchi edition, several further manuscripts of De triplici via have been discovered, taking the total to over 300; see De triplici via, trans. Schlosser, 11. For printed Latin editions of these works down to ca. 1503, see GW 4686–93, 4:418a–419b (Soliloquium); 4705–8 (De triplici via); 4644, 4646–50 (collected editions of Bonaventure’s opuscula containing one or both of the treatises, and in most cases also De regimine animae). ⁶ On the reception of Bonaventure’s writings in Germany and the Low Countries, and the vernacular translations of De triplici via and the Soliloquium, see Steer, “Rezeption”; Ruh, Bonaventura deutsch, 63–78, 98–159; also the updated list of versions and textual witnesses in VL 2:938, 939–40. ⁷ For the Devotio Moderna, see Chapter 4. ⁸ The three ways of De triplici via (purgative, illuminative, unitive) define the basic structure of spiritual exercise in García de Cisneros, Exercitatorio, prólogo, Obras completas 2:91; Book of Exercises, trans. Peers, 4. Purgation and illumination are the aim of the exercises of the first and second week respectively in Ignatius Loyola, Exercitia spiritualia, section 10, ed. Calveras and Dalmases, 148–50; Spiritual Exercises, trans. Ganss, 24. See Bonnefoy, “De triplici via,” pt. 2, 301–18; also the literature on Cisneros and Ignatius mentioned in note 94 of Chapter 4.

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unhappy by the fickle dictates of their passions.⁹ Because the pagan ideal of a life guided by the logos so easily converged with the Christian ideal of a life dedicated to a God who was the one true Logos, the practice of spiritual exercise was maintained and adapted by educated Christians in the ancient world, and went on to become a fixture of monastic asceticism.¹⁰ In the enclosed community of the monastery, the training and discipline of the soul through a regimen of vigilance, meditation, and remembrance of the last end became the indispensable component of a lifestyle in which every feeling, thought, and deed was directed to the service of God and the conquest of heaven through the “bloodless martyrdom” of work, study, and prayer.¹¹ Bonaventure was well acquainted with the writers who had shaped the ethos and the habitus of monasticism in the medieval West, from Augustine and Benedict in the fifth and sixth centuries to Bernard of Clairvaux and the school of St. Victor in the twelfth.¹² Nevertheless, his regimen of the soul was not a continuation of monastic tradition, but its transformation. In order to make traditional techniques of spiritual exercise available to users in the various branches of the Franciscan movement and beyond, it was necessary to adapt them: to make them more explicit and more directive so as to compensate for their users’ lack of acculturation in the customs and practices of the special environment of the monastery. Yet it would be a mistake to regard the methodicalness that resulted from this adaptation as nothing other than a simplification to meet the needs of people without education or spiritual training. Certainly in the case of the Soliloquium, which may have been intended primarily for Franciscan nuns and lay tertiaries, it was important to Bonaventure that his thorough and systematic directions for spiritual exercise be expressed “in simple words for the sake of every simpler person,” as he put it in the prologue to that work;¹³ elsewhere however his methodicalness was the reflection of a technical sophistication in matters of philosophy and epistemology which catered to the intellectual horizons of the kind of Franciscan who, like the author himself, had studied at university.¹⁴ ⁹ The classic study is Rabbow, Seelenführung, though see the criticisms of his interpretation of the sources by Ingenkamp, Plutarchs Schriften, 99–105, 118–24. Plutarch’s psychotherapeutic program of askēsis, epilogismos, and ethismos is also discussed by Van Hoof, Plutarch’s Practical Ethics, chap. 2. Hadot, Exercices spirituels, 13–58, concentrates on the role of spiritual exercise in philosophy; the medical tradition is discussed briefly in the context of Greco-Roman sexual ethics by Foucault, Care of the Self, 133–44. ¹⁰ Hadot, Exercices spirituels, 59–74. ¹¹ On the formation of monasticism in the Latin West, and its definition as “bloodless martryrdom,” see Markus, End of Ancient Christianity, chap. 5, esp. 70–2. ¹² For Bonaventure’s familiarity with the monastic “classics,” see Bougerol, Introduction, 30–9; Bougerol, “Saint Bonaventure et saint Bernard.” ¹³ Bonaventure, Soliloquium prologus 4, Opera omnia 8:29; trans. Etzkorn, 220. On the work’s intended readership, see Schlosser, “Life and Works,” 41. ¹⁴ University study for a Franciscan was by no means uncontroversial in the first decades of the thirteenth century; the more conservative members of the movement considered it a betrayal of the ideals of poverty and humility professed by their founder, Francis of Assisi. Nevertheless, a network of

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In this chapter I describe the ways in which Bonaventure transformed monastic remembrance of the last end into what has been called an “art of systematic souldirection.”¹⁵ The transformation has three distinct but interconnected aspects, each one manifesting itself in a key rhetorical or linguistic feature of the writings under discussion. First, a comparison of the guiding metaphors of meditation in the Benedictine Rule (ca. 540) and in Bonaventure reveals an utterly transformed conception of the kind of activity that remembrance is considered to be. The Rule talks about it in metaphors of artisanship and practical know-how: remembering the last end is one of the tools of the monk’s trade, to be deployed by him in the workshop of the monastery; in another, related metaphor, it is to climb, one by one, the steps on the ladder of his life’s vocation. The metaphors thus connote an activity that is regulated and handed on through tradition, is rooted in the customary lifestyle of a community, and relies on knowledge acquired in the doing rather than in prior theoretical study. The same vocabulary of steps and ladders is conspicuous in Bonaventure’s spiritual exercises, but with an altogether different meaning and valency. To climb the steps of the ladder now means to execute the stages of a procedure which has been described in writing before it is put into practice, and is not tied to any particular form of life in any particular community, but may be applied anywhere.¹⁶ In their new context of use, the words are often demetaphorized—that is, they have become terms in a technical jargon with well-defined and stable significations: “step” is the technical term for “stage of implementation,” “ladder” for “scheme of exercises.” Moreover, wherever the words retain a metaphorical quality in Bonaventure’s writing, they are utterly transvalued: no longer connoting artisanship, the metaphors of steps and ladder instead encode a theological postulate: the notion that the universe is a hierarchical structure designed by God so as to afford humans the possibility of progressing stage by stage to reach him. The new connotations that Bonaventure gave to the metaphors point to a second transformation, which affects the fundament of the activity of remembering the last end. Whereas monastic remembrance depended on the lifeworld in Franciscan institutions of higher study, some of them connected to university theology faculties, was already emerging by the 1230s; see Roest, Franciscan Education, 2–31. It is likely that De triplici via, with its technical and treatise-like approach, was written with the needs of academically educated friars in mind; cf. Roest, Franciscan Learning, 63–4. ¹⁵ Ruh, Bonaventura deutsch, 71: “Kunst der systematischen Seelenführung.” ¹⁶ This independence of place or context of application, which greatly facilitated the uptake of Bonaventure’s regimens by all kinds of reader in the later Middle Ages, may have been devised initially as a response to the new mobility of friars in the Franciscan order. Whereas the traditional monk vowed to maintain stabilitas loci, to remain always in the same place (cf. Benedict, Regula 58.17, ed. Hanslik, 136; Rule, trans. White, 86), the friars moved from one place to another in the course of studying and preaching. The consistency and transmissibility of meditational and other devotional practices could thus no longer be guaranteed by long-term residence in the place where the practices were cultivated and passed on from master to apprentice; they could however be stabilized in spite of the translocations of the individual practitioners thanks to an explicitly articulated procedure set down in writing.

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which it was practiced for its reproduction and its efficacy—take away the institution of the monastery and there is no means for transmitting the technique or framework for applying it—Bonaventure’s method of spiritual exercise was founded not on a particular vocation or way of life but on an epistemological theory of how humans may achieve knowledge and the experience of transcendence. This “epistemologization” of remembrance reveals itself above all in the shifting usages of the word “philosophy.” Late antique Christianity inherited a Platonic definition of philosophy as meletē thanatou, the “meditation” or “practice of death”: Plato’s ideal philosopher is someone who dismisses the evidence of the material world mediated by her corporeal senses so as to leave her mind free to contemplate the ideal reality of the transcendent and eternal forms; when detaching her mind from her senses in this way the philosopher is said to be “practicing” the separation of soul and body that will one day befall her in actual physical death. The Platonic definition was easily transferred to the situation of the Christian monk who fulfilled his calling by metaphorically dying to the world of transient material things and concentrating his thoughts and desires on the everlasting life to come. In the monastic way of thinking, the activities of philosophizing and contemplating eternity were largely coterminous with each other and also with an enclosed existence in the institution of the monastery; the word “philosophy,” as it was used in monastic discourse, came to mean all of these things. For Bonaventure, who received his education in the academic community of a university and spent the early part of his career teaching there, “philosophy” was not a metaphor for a form of ascetic life or a synonym for contemplation but the name of an Aristotelian science. This philosophical science was something both far more circumscribed than monastic philosophy and far more potent. It was more circumscribed, because Bonaventure restricted the scope of philosophy to what he regarded as its proper domains of rational, natural, and moral philosophy, and ranked these lower in the hierarchy of knowledge than either theology or contemplation. It was more potent, thanks to Bonaventure’s theory of knowledge by divine illumination. The theory posits that the exercise of philosophical reason is regulated by a divine principle: if a philosopher knows anything for certain, it is not by virtue of her own reason which, being human, is necessarily mutable and fallible; the certainty must be the gift of an immutable and infallible agency, which can only be God. The application of the theory was not confined to the domain of philosophical epistemology, where it provided an account of how we come to know anything with certainty; it had a further application in the realm of devotion and spiritual exercise. For if we know things for certain only because God illuminates our minds with the truth, it follows that a philosophy that reflects on the limits of its reason may potentially cross over into contemplation of the source of certain knowledge: the eternal and transcendent God whose light shines into human minds. A philosophical theory of epistemology thus provided Bonaventure with the enabling fundament for spiritual exercise.

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The third transformation is also connected with the first. If remembering the last end has become a formalized procedure, and if the consistency and transmissibility of the procedure are guaranteed through its being put into words and written down, that means there has also been a change in the function of textuality in the performance of spiritual exercise. This transformation is reflected in the texts’ hortatory rhetoric—in the directions, that is, that they issue to their readers. The eleventh and twelfth centuries witnessed a flourishing of the genre of written meditations on the last things by monastic authors. Intended for slow, ruminative, immersive reading, these texts addressed themselves to readers who were presumed to have some facility already for developing the prompts on the page into meditations of their own. Accordingly, the most famous example of the genre, the Prayers and Meditations of Anselm (between 1070 and 1080), puts the meditating reader in charge of the process, instructing her to read only as much of the text as she may care to or find useful, in any order she likes, and developing her thoughts in whatever direction she sees fit to take them. Bonaventure, who knew, admired, and even quoted Anselm’s Prayers and Meditations, reversed the relationship between text and reader, replacing programmatic directionlessness with an equally programmatic directedness. His meditating reader is exhorted to concentrate her thoughts on only the topics presented to her by the text, in their entirety and in the exact order in which they are given; selections, shortcuts, and deviations are not permitted. Thus it is not the reader who determines how the text is used, but the text that imposes the content, the order, and the direction of meditation on the reader. No longer a resource or an inspiration for users assumed to be capable of developing their own trains of thought, textuality has become the regulator of a practice of spiritual exercise which consists in faithfully executing the program of the script.

2. The tools and the ladder To be a monk was to live in a state of eschatological mindfulness.¹⁷ Always remembering his last end, a monk was expected to check and monitor his every thought, deed, and impulse, certain in the knowledge that an infinitely more vigilant judge was watching over him. Fear of damnation and desire for eternal life in heaven were the affective products of this habitus of self-control and also its propellants, endowing it with a self-perpetuating momentum, for once they had been orchestrated by an act of remembering fear and desire were the impetus for its renewal. The cultivation of fear and desire in relation to the last things was required of each and every monk by the Benedictine Rule, the most widely used ¹⁷ On the “eschatological tendency” of medieval monastic culture—the integration of reading, study, and experience in the striving for eternal life—see Leclercq, Love of Learning, chap. 4.

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monastic rule in the medieval West.¹⁸ Its list of seventy-four “tools of good works” (instrumenta bonorum operum), a canon of rules and maxims for living in harmony with God and the rest of the monastic community, includes the following six precepts: To fear the day of judgment; to be in dread of hell; to desire eternal life with all the craving of your spirit; to keep death daily before your eyes; to keep watch over the actions of your life at all times; to know for certain that God sees you everywhere. Diem iudicii timere, gehennam expauiscere, uitam aeternam omni concupiscentia spiritali desiderare, mortem cottidie ante oculos suspectam habere. Actus uitae suae omni hora custodire. In omni loco deum se respicere pro certo scire.¹⁹

These precepts are an expansion of the first part of Sirach 7:40: “In all thy works remember thy last end”; the corollary, “and thou shalt never sin,” finds its equivalent in the concluding statement to the list, where Benedict explains that if the monks apply these and all the other “tools of the spiritual craft” (instrumenta artis spiritalis) ceaselessly and diligently in the “workshop” (officina) of the monastery, and return them to God on judgment day, they will receive their “wages” (merces) in heaven.²⁰ An almost identical set of precepts is presented in another part of the Rule, which is concerned with humility. Once again, Benedict uses metaphors of craft, though on this occasion the monk’s life in the monastery is figured not as generic craft labor, but as the more determinate activity of a workman (operarius) climbing a ladder. Like the other tools of the workshop, the ladder (scala) leads to heaven, and the laboring monk will successfully ascend its first rung (gradus) if he utterly shuns forgetfulness and, keeping the fear of God always before his eyes, always remembers everything God commands, so that in his mind he is forever unfolding thoughts of how hell will burn those who show contempt for God because of their sins, and how eternal life is prepared for those who fear God. And guarding himself at every hour from sins and vices, whether of thought or speech or hands or feet or will, and also from the desires of the flesh, he should consider that God is always watching him from heaven at every hour, and his

¹⁸ On the Rule, see especially Vogüé, Rule of Saint Benedict; Dunn, Emergence of Monasticism, chap. 6. ¹⁹ Benedict, Regula 4.44–9, ed. Hanslik, 32; Rule, trans. White, 18. For the sequence and structure of the tools of good works, see Vogüé, Rule, chap. 4. ²⁰ Benedict, Regula 4.75–8, ed. Hanslik, 34–5; Rule, trans. White, 18. In the prologue to the Rule (prologus 14, ed. Hanslik, 3; trans. White, 8), the monk is described as the “workman” (operarius), summoned to his task by the Lord.

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  deeds are visible everywhere to the divine eyes and are being reported at every hour to God by the angels. si timorem dei sibi ante oculos semper ponens obliuionem omnino fugiat et semper sit memor omnia, quae praecepit deus, ut, qualiter et contemnentes deum gehenna de peccatis incendat, et uita aeterna, quae timentibus deum praeparata est, animo suo semper euolbat. Et custodiens se omni hora a peccatis et uitiis, id est cogitationum, linguae, manuum, pedum uel uoluntatis propriae, sed et desideria carnis, aestimet se homo de caelis a deo semper respici omni hora et facta sua omni loco ab abspectu diuinitatis uideri et ab angelis omni hora renuntiari.²¹

The ladder metaphor is derived from the vision of Jacob, the Old Testament patriarch who saw in his dream a ladder reaching up from earth to heaven with angels ascending and descending (Gn 28:12). Proceeding from the maxim “Anyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and anyone who humbles himself will be exalted” (Lk 14:11), Benedict explains that if a monk exhibits pride, he will surely descend, whereas if he wishes to reach heavenly exaltation, he must ascend through deeds of humility, in other words “must set up the ladder that Jacob saw in his dream [scala illa erigenda est, quae in somno Iacob apparuit].”²² The ladder and its component parts are then expounded in a brief allegory: the ladder as a whole stands for the monk’s life in this world; its two sides are his body and his soul; the twelve rungs are the steps of humility and discipline, which are fixed into the monk’s body and soul by his calling to serve God; if (Benedict adds after describing the rungs individually) he succeeds in climbing to the top of the ladder, he will be the “workman, now cleansed from vices and sins” who has reached “the perfect love of God which casts out all fear” (1 Jn 4:18).²³ Benedict’s metaphors of the tools and the ladder oblige followers of the Rule to consider their vocation as a kind of artisanship, with all that the term implies.²⁴ ²¹ Benedict, Regula 7.10–13, ed. Hanslik, 41–2; Rule, trans. White, 22–3. ²² Ibid. 7.1–6, ed. Hanslik, 39–40; trans. White, 22. ²³ Ibid. 7.8–9, 7.67, 7.70, ed. Hanslik, 41, 52: “Scala uero ipsa erecta nostra est uita in saeculo, quae humiliato corde a domino erigatur ad caelum. Latera enim eius scalae dicimus nostrum esse corpus et animam, in qua latera diuersos gradus humilitatis uel disciplinae euocatio diuina ascendendo inseruit. . . . Ergo, his omnibus humilitatis gradibus ascensis monachus mox ad caritatem dei perueniet illam, quae perfecta foris mittit timorem. . . . Quae dominus iam in operarium suum mundum a uitiis et peccatis spiritu sancto dignabitur demonstrare.” Trans. White, 22, 26: “That ladder is our life in this world which God raises to heaven if we are humble in heart. Our body and soul form the sides of this ladder into which the divine calling has fixed the different rungs of humility and discipline which we have to climb. . . . When the monk has climbed up all these steps of humility, he will reach ‘the perfect love of God which casts out all fear’ . . . The Lord in his kindness will by the Holy Spirit give evidence of this [sc. that the monk now does good deeds out of positive desire rather than fear] in his workman, now cleansed from vices and sins.” ²⁴ The metaphors of the tools and the ladder are not unique to Benedict, but also found in another early monastic rule, the so-called Rule of the Master; cf. Règle du Maître 4, 6, 10, ed. Vogüé, 1:376, 380, 418–44; Rule of the Master, trans. Eberle, 118, 119, 131–9; the word used for tool is ferramentum, “iron

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Artisanship is typically learned through apprenticeship; its knowledge is not formalized as a theory which can be studied apart from the application, but is a practical skill or know-how, acquired and refined in the doing. The Rule’s metaphors equate competence in remembering the last end with the ability to handle a tool or climb a ladder: a skill that is learned, perfected, and passed on by doing and imitating, not as a body of theoretical knowledge. Artisanship moreover results in transformation: of the raw materials, which are made into useful objects; of the physical environment, which is accommodated to human needs and purposes; of the artisan, who becomes more skilled with each accomplished task. The Rule focuses entirely on this last transformation: the most important product of a lifetime’s diligent labor with the tools of the workshop is not the artefacts made or the repairs effected, but the meritorious workman, who receives his wages from God; climbing the ladder is not a prelude to the real task, to be executed in some high up and otherwise inaccessible zone, it is the task, and brings about a transformation in the workman who, on reaching the topmost rung, is cleansed from vices and sins. A nonmetaphorical word for the kind of meditational work that the Rule describes as handling a tool or climbing rungs on a ladder is orthopraxis. Defined as “right action,” orthopraxis has been said by scholars of comparative religion to constitute one of three universal determinants of human faith in the divine. The two others are orthodoxy and orthopoiesis. The former highlights the believer’s intellectual assent to a body of “correct doctrine properly formulated”; the latter is closely associated with orthopraxis, and together they draw attention to the fact that faith is defined just as much by the believer’s disposition to behave in a certain manner as it is by her intellectual assent to a set of doctrinal tenets. The difference between the two words is that orthopoiesis—“right doing” in the sense of following the moral code of religion—refers to the kind of action where the result “falls on the external object to which the act is directed,” whereas orthopraxis or “right action” is reserved for the kind of faith-inspired performance in which “the act reverts on the agent himself and transforms him.”²⁵ Applied to the culture of monasticism in the medieval West, orthopraxis has come to designate those institutionalized manifestations of religiosity where the rightness of the performance is judged by a kind of implicit know-how, which is not formally codified but transmitted through imitation and practice, and where implement.” The controversy over whether the Rule of the Master predates Benedict’s Rule and may have been a source, or is later and derivative, need not concern us, since it was Benedict’s version that would become definitive for early medieval monasticism in the Christian West. For further details, see Vogüé, Community and Abbot, 23–32, 453–82; Vogüé, “Master”; Dunn, “Mastering Benedict.” ²⁵ Panikkar, Religion and Religions, 369; Panikkar, “Faith,” 40–2. Although the definitions cited are Panikkar’s, the terms “orthopraxis” (and its alternative “orthopraxy”) are not original to him, but have been current in the study of comparative religion since at least the early twentieth century; cf. Encyclopedia of Religion 11:129–33.

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the goal is the transformation of the individual who performs the act. Thus, the cultivation of silence as part of monastic routine has been characterized as “a tradition of moral study and right practice” which is like “an orthopraxis, a devotional practice imitated and expanded by the tradition”;²⁶ the word has even been used to categorize the whole of monastic education: a training in prayer and meditation that relies upon “an orthopraxis, a craft ‘knowledge’ which is learned, and indeed can only be learned, by the painstaking practical imitation and complete familiarization of exemplary masters’ techniques and experiences” and thus requires to be understood as “an apprenticeship to a craft which is also a way of life.”²⁷ The activity at the center of the monk’s apprenticeship in meditation was reading. Meditation began with reading, especially the Psalms and other biblical texts, in a slow process which involved repeating the words to oneself in a low voice so as to memorize them, either word for word or as a sequence of keywords which combined into a paraphrase; the memorization created a resource for recollection and further meditative elaboration. As the monk pondered the textual matter, he would become alert to the traces of the divine that the words were thought to contain, and the words, laden now with world-transcending significance, turned not just his mind, but his whole moral habitus to God.²⁸ The techniques that facilitated this character-forming orthopraxis of meditative reading were derived from grammar and rhetoric. Grammar, especially the Isidorean conception of it as the pursuit of etymologies or word “origins” (origines), imparted a notion of language as a system of signs which, when traced back to their roots, revealed the order of God’s creation.²⁹ Rhetoric taught techniques of memorization, sensory stimulation, and composition that were integral to meditative reading. Ruminating upon a text, say a verse from a psalm, a monk would recollect mental imagery and other bits of text he associated with it from previous reading and study, and from hearing the verse repeated in the liturgy; then he would apply his rhetorical skill to develop these items in new trains of thought, whose articulation again made use of images as well as words called up from memory.³⁰ For those monks who pursued advanced studies of the scriptures and were familiar with the principle of discovering various levels of nonliteral meaning there, anagogical interpretation, which connected the historical facts of Bible narrative to their referents in the eschatological future, might provide a

²⁶ Gehl, “Competens silentium,” 126, 157. ²⁷ Carruthers, Craft, 1–2. ²⁸ Gehl, “Competens silentium,” 138–43. See also Riché, Education, 115–21. ²⁹ Gehl, “Competens silentium,” 140. On grammar in the monastic school curriculum, see Riché, Education, 469–75; for Isidore of Seville’s conception and practice of etymology, see Fontaine, “L’étymologie isidorienne.” ³⁰ The indispensable studies of the memorial and rhetorical bases of monastic thought, and the dependency of thought on cognitive images as well as words for its articulation, are Carruthers, Memory; Carruthers, Craft.

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further encouragement for developing their reading into contemplations of the last end.³¹ It took special circumstances for the implicit know-how of this meditational orthopraxis to be made the object of a discursive, theoretical reflection. One such occasion was the decision of the Synod of Aachen in 817 to require all monasteries in the Carolingian Empire to conform to the Benedictine Rule.³² The directive was accompanied by an effort of explanation, and the earliest and most widely disseminated of several ninth-century commentaries on the Rule, by Abbot Smaragdus of Saint-Mihiel, contains an extensive exposition of the tools of the spiritual craft.³³ In the case of the eschatological tools, Smaragdus begins by explaining why fear and desire are appropriate responses to the last things: “The day of judgment is greatly to be feared . . . because although it is mild for the upright, it is exceedingly terrible for sinners and the unjust”;³⁴ “not only the monk but every Christian must dread this place [Gehenna], which is so terrible”;³⁵ “monks must desire eternal life, because there they will cease from hard labors and possess an eternal inheritance and perpetual rest.”³⁶ Smaragdus next elaborates and amplifies his reasons with biblical and patristic quotations, and adds further arguments of his own. In so doing, he goes beyond the ostensible purpose of explaining and demonstrating the precepts of the Rule, and provides readers with a stock of images and rhetorical resources which they could deploy in meditations of their own. For example, Smaragdus reinforces his assertion that the day of judgment is exceedingly terrible by citing the fearsome descriptions in Zephaniah 1:14–17 and Hebrews 10:28: darkness and fog, cloud and whirlwind, trumpet and alarm, blood and bodies of sinners poured out as earth and dung, fire that rages and consumes the damned in judgment. This biblical image-set is followed by a series of rhetorical questions calculated to stimulate the intellectual as well as emotional participation of the

³¹ On the anagogical interpretation of scripture and its close connection to contemplation, see Lubac, Exégèse médiévale, pt. 1, chap. 10, esp. 633–43; for an overview of the study of the Bible in medieval monasteries, see Dahan, L’Exégèse chrétienne, 79–91. ³² Monumenta Germaniae Historica Concilia 2 pt. i, 464–5. On Carolingian legislation for reform of the church and clergy and its dissemination, see McKitterick, Frankish Church, chap. 1. ³³ Smaragdus, Expositio in Regulam 44–7, ed. Spannagel and Engelbert, 125–8; Commentary, trans. Barry, 214–18. Smaragdus participated in the synod of 817, and wrote his commentary soon afterwards; his modern editors list sixty-six manuscripts and fragments, including some now lost, dating from the ninth to sixteenth centuries: see the introduction to the aforementioned edition, xv–xxi. Smaragdus’ priority has been established conclusively by Hafner, Der Basiliuskommentar, 59–111, 152, who shows that another Carolingian commentary on the Rule, previously attributed to Paulus Diaconus (d. 799), is in fact a recension of a work of the late 840s. ³⁴ Smaragdus, Expositio in Regulam 44, ed. Spannagel and Engelbert, 125: “Timendus est valde dies iudicii peccatoribus, quia quamvis mitis sit iustis, terribilis valde est peccatoribus et iniquis.” Commentary, trans. Barry, 214. ³⁵ Ibid. 45, ed. Spannagel and Engelbert, 126: “Hunc enim tam terribilem locum non solum monachus sed omnis debet expavescere christianus.” Trans. Barry, 216. ³⁶ Ibid. 46, ed. Spannagel and Engelbert, 127: “Desiderare enim debent vitam aeternam monachi, quia ibi a duris laboribus cessabunt et aeternam hereditatem et perpetuam requiem possidebunt.” Trans. Barry, 217.

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readers, whom Smaragdus addresses as fellow monks, in the dread events of the dies irae: “We must think now, brothers [fratres], of what we shall be able to do when we come to that last judgment to be judged . . . What shall we do when placed before the majesty of so great a judge? To whose help shall we fly, or whose aid shall we seek, or what excuse shall we be able to offer?”³⁷ The fear and desire engendered by methodically working through the list of questions will induce the required aversion from sin: “And so it is now, while we are alive and able, that we must turn away from evil and do good, and in all things continually seek [the Lord’s] help, so that with his aid we may persevere till the end in the good work we have begun, and on that day of judgment we may be put with the lambs at his right hand and hear: Come, blessed of my father, receive the kingdom that was prepared for you from the beginning of the world [Mt 25:34].”³⁸ Toward the end of the twelfth century, another Benedictine abbot was prompted to reflect on the role of fear and desire in monastic life. This time the occasion was not an official drive to impose uniformity, but a wish on the part of certain individuals to define the common ground in a monastic scene that had become considerably more diverse over the preceding hundred years, thanks to the establishment of new orders such as the Cistercians and Premonstratensians.³⁹ Writing around 1179 to his friend, the Augustinian canon Richard of Salisbury, Peter of Celle made a distinction between those features of the religious life that could be regarded as nonessential, variable “accidentals” (accidentalia), and those that were its defining principles or constitutive “substantials” (substantialia/substantiva); among the latter he counted the meditation of death (meditatio mortis).⁴⁰ Fear and desire are assigned clearly distinct roles as respectively the means and motive of this substantive monastic practice. For those who are good, says Peter, nothing is more desirable than death; it is the exit from the prison and disorder of this life to the kingdom and glory of heaven, where “everything will be new, sure, abiding, wondrous and lovable.”⁴¹ But the desire for heaven is realized and articulated only

³⁷ Ibid. 44, ed. Spannagel and Engelbert, 125: “Cogitare modo, fratres, debemus quid facere poterimus, cum ad illud ultimum iudicandi iudicium venerimus . . . Quid faciemus sub tanti iudicis maiestate positi? Sub cuius fugiemus auxilium vel cuius quaeremus adiutorium aut quid excusationis poterimus obtendere?” Trans. Barry, 215. ³⁸ Ibid., ed. Spannagel and Engelbert, 126: “Unde necesse est modo ut dum vivimus et valemus, declinemus a malo et faciamus bonum, et in omnibus iugiter eius quaeramus adiutorium, ut in bono quo coepimus opere illo adiuvante perseveremus usque in finem, ut in die iudicii cum agnis a dextris positi, ‘Venite’ audiamus ‘benedicti patris mei, percipite regnum quod vobis paratum est ab origine mundi.’ ” Trans. Barry, 215. ³⁹ On new religious communities and forms of life in the twelfth century, see Constable, Reformation, chap. 2. ⁴⁰ Peter of Celle, De disciplina claustrali 2.4–5, ed. Martel, 128–30; School of the Cloister, trans. Feiss, 72–3. The other substantialia are silence, reading, confession and prayer; each one has its foundation in a verse from the Bible, which in the case of meditatio mortis is Sir 7:40. ⁴¹ Peter of Celle, De disciplina claustrali 24.1, ed. Martel, 258–60: “Morte . . . nichil bonis appetibilius . . . exitus de carcere ad regnum, de confusione ad gloriam . . . in qua nova, certa, mansura et mira et amabilia erunt omnia.” School of the Cloister, trans. Feiss, 110.

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by working through the fear of bodily death, following a series of instructions and images. Peter’s reader is told first to “Paint death before your eyes: how horrible its face, how dark and grim its countenance”; then he must present himself before the face of his savior, whose own death on the cross has deprived death of its terrifying power to inflict harm: “The divinity which hidden in Jesus’ flesh shattered the molars in death’s mouth, when it rashly bit at the flesh of the Word. Even if it bites us like a snake or a horned serpent, if we have the horns of the cross in our hands, if we carry the blood of the lamb over both posts and the lintels, then all that horrible armor of Leviathan described in Job will be destroyed, and its innards, bored through with this spear, will lie open.”⁴² Meditatio mortis as Peter describes it consists therefore in imaginatively manipulating a set of mental pictures: death’s face is to be replaced by Christ’s; molars, fangs, and armor are visualized to instill and provide a focus for fear, but only so that this same fear may be dissipated as we picture the shattering of the images that inspired it.⁴³ The concern to find the substantive common ground also characterizes the Golden Epistle, a program for monastic perfection addressed to the Carthusians at Mont Dieu by William of St. Thierry, at the time of writing (ca. 1145) a Cistercian who had previously been a Benedictine abbot.⁴⁴ William adopts the traditional metaphor of the workshop as the place where monks achieve perfection in the spiritual life; he applies it however not to the whole monastery, but to the individual monk’s cell. Writing about the ascetic discipline by means of which a novice monk will gradually overcome his animal nature, William observes that “all these good practices demand the cell as their workshop (officina) and an enduring perseverance in it”; using a second, noncraft metaphor, he further describes the cell as the “infirmary” (valetudinarium) where sick, i.e. sinful, individuals are restored to health, provided that they submit themselves to the physician’s orders: “You must know that frequent changing from one course of treatment to another is harmful; it upsets nature and weakens the sick man. . . . Stay put then and do not change your course of treatment but apply the remedy of medicinal obedience until you arrive at the goal of perfect health.”⁴⁵

⁴² Ibid. 24.4, ed. Martel, 262–4: “Depinge mortem ante oculos tuos, quam horrida est facies eius, vultus quam obscurus et torvus . . . Ut ergo de ventre ceti huius Dominus nos extrahat, praeoccupemus faciem eius in confessione . . . Latens in carne Iesu divinitas molares mortis dentes in ore ipsius confregit, cum carnem Verbi morsu temerario momordit. Et si itaque nos mordeat ut coluber et ut cerastes, si crucis cornua prae manibus habemus, si sanguinem agni super utrumque postem et in superliminaribus gestamus, tota illa Leviathan horribilis armatura quae in Iob describitur destruetur [cf. Jb 40:20–1], et intestina eius hoc iaculo terebrata rimabuntur.” Trans. Feiss, 112. ⁴³ The imagery of biting molars and fangs is suggested by the etymology of “death” (mors) from “bite” (morsus); cf. Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae 11.2.31, ed. Lindsay. On Peter’s use of mental pictures in meditation, see further Carruthers, Craft, 205–9. ⁴⁴ For William’s career and the background to the writing of the Epistle, see Ruh, Geschichte 1, chap. 9; McGinn, Growth of Mysticism, chap. 6, esp. 225–8. ⁴⁵ William of St. Thierry, Epistola 94, 97, ed. Verdeyen, 248: “Omnium uero bonorum officina cella est, et stabilis perseuerantia in ea”; “Scito quia remedia crebro mutata nocent, naturam turbant, aegrum

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The “remedy of medicinal obedience” consists of a regular program of spiritual exercises, which grow more ambitious as the monk progresses from novice status to proficiency, and from proficiency to perfection.⁴⁶ Meditating on the last things is a constant feature of this program. Playing on the similarity between the words cella, “cell,” caelum, “heaven,” and celare, “to hide,” William explains how the eschatological tools of Benedict’s monastic workshop, “to be in dread of hell” and “to desire eternal life with all the craving of your spirit,” are to be applied in the infirmary of the cell: For both caelum and cella appear to be derived from celare, to hide, and the same thing is hidden in cells as in heaven, the same occupation characterizes both the one and the other. What is this? Leisure devoted to God, the enjoyment of God . . . . For when heavenly pursuits are continually practiced in the cell, heaven is brought into close proximity to the cell by the reality which underlies them both alike, by the loving devotion common to both, and by the similarity of the effects they produce. Neither does the spirit at prayer or even when it takes leave of the body find the way from its cell to heaven long or difficult now. For the ascent is often made from the cell into heaven, whereas scarcely ever is the descent made from the cell into hell, unless, as the Psalm [54:16] says: “Let them go down alive” in order not to go down when they die. In this way indeed the inmates of cells often go down into hell. Just as by constant meditation they love to pass in review the joys of heaven in order to desire them more ardently, so also the pains of hell, in order to dread them and flee from them. A celando enim et caelum et cella nomen habere uidentur. Et quod celatur in caelis, hoc et in cellis; quod geritur in caelis, hoc et in cellis. Quidnam hoc est? Vacare Deo, frui Deo . . . . Nam cum in cella iugiter caelestia actitantur, caelum cellae, et sacramenti similitudine, et pietatis affectu, et simili operis effectu, proximum efficitur; nec iam spiritui oranti, uel etiam a corpore exeunti, a cella in caelum longa uel difficilis uia inuenitur. A cella enim in caelum saepe ascenditur; uix autem umquam a cella in infernum descenditur, nisi sicut dicit psalmus: Descendant uiuentes, ne descendant morientes. Hoc enim modo cellarum incolae saepe descendunt in infernum. Sicut enim assidue contemplando reuisere amant gaudia caelestia, ut ardentius ea appetant; sic et dolores inferni, ut horreant et refugiant.⁴⁷

disterminant. . . . Non ergo te mutes, nec aliud pro alio accipias, sed usque ad terminum perfectae sanitatis, medicinalis obedientiae remedio utere.” Golden Epistle, trans. Berkeley, 43, 44–5. ⁴⁶ On the structure and program of the Epistle, see Déchanet, introduction to William of St. Thierry, Golden Epistle, trans. Berkeley, 31–41; Ruh, Geschichte 1:310–19. ⁴⁷ William of St. Thierry, Epistola 31–3, ed. Verdeyen, 234–5; Golden Epistle, trans. Berkeley, 20–1.

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Unlike Smaragdus and Peter of Celle, who develop their commentary on the precepts and principles of monastic living into meditative compositions on the last things, William does not elaborate in the Golden Epistle on the joys of heaven and the pains of hell that the monk should constantly “pass in review” in his cell. There is however a separate meditation by him on the theme of the joy of the blessed in heaven. Beginning with the text of Revelation 4:1 (“I saw a door opened in heaven, and the first voice which I heard was as it were of a trumpet speaking to me, which said: Come up hither”), the meditation continues in the first-person voice and grapples with the difficulties inherent in understanding a God whose being transcends all human faculties and categories of reason. The desire to experience this God directly by entering heaven is articulated in a series of biblical metaphors of salvation—entering the door of heaven (Rv 4:1), the door of the ark (Gn 6:16), the door of Christ (Jn 10:9)—and climaxes in a reprise of the psalm that the monk is meant to recollect in the solitude of his cell: I am so weary of my life that I am ready sometimes to go down alive into hell— may I never descend there dead!—to find out what is happening there too! But when I find it written on the very threshold that there is nobody in hell who worships you [Ps 6:6], I curse the place and flee. I hear the weeping and gnashing of teeth within [Mt 8:12]; but please, Lord, do not let me go down there! My eyes are ever looking to you, O Lord, to you who dwell in the heavens. a taedio uitae meae libet me aliquando descendere ad infernem uiuentem, ne contingat me illuc descendere morientem, ut uideam quid etiam ibi agatur. Sed cum in primo eius limine scriptum inuenio, quia in inferno non est qui confitebitur tibi, anathema ei dicens, inde refugio. Audio intro fletum oculorum et stridorem dentium, sed non mihi contingat Domine, usque illuc descendere. Ad te, Domine, ad te semper oculi mei qui habitas in caelis.⁴⁸

Textualized meditations on the last things were a productive genre among monastic writers of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Besides William of St. Thierry, there are examples by John of Fécamp, Peter Damian, Rupert of Deutz and, most famously of all, Anselm.⁴⁹ It is important to remember that these meditations are textual compositions, not transcriptions by their authors of prior cogitations. Nonetheless, they may be considered as products of monastic ⁴⁸ William of St. Thierry, Meditationes devotissimae 6.25–6, ed. Verdeyen, 41; Meditations, trans. Sister Penelope, 133. ⁴⁹ John of Fécamp, Libellus de scripturis et verbis patrum 4, 20, 25, PL 40:904, 916–17, 919–20; Peter Damian, letter 66, Briefe, ed. Reindel, 2:247–79; Letters, trans. Blum, 3:40–69; Rupert of Deutz, De meditatione mortis; Anselm, Meditationes sive orationes 1 and 2, SAO 3:76–9, 80–3, Prayers and Meditations, trans. Ward, 221–9. On these texts and their authors, see Fulton, From Judgment to Passion, 145–50, 155–70, 174–7; McNamer, Affective Meditation, 62–80; Van Engen, Rupert of Deutz, 239, 268–9; Anselm, Prayers and Meditations, trans. Ward, 27–86.

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orthopraxis, in the sense that their text is generated by the same principle as a mentally entertained meditation, namely the amplification of familiar verses from the Bible and the liturgy, especially the Office of the Dead. Among such generative verses are “God shall come manifestly; our God shall come, and shall not keep silence. A fire shall burn before him, and a mighty tempest shall be round about him. He shall call heaven from above, and the earth, to judge his people” (Ps 49:3–4); “Woe is me, that my sojourning is prolonged; I have dwelt with the inhabitants of Cedar” (Ps 119:5);⁵⁰ “The judgment sat and the books were opened” (Dn 7:10); “The loftiness of men shall be bowed down and the haughtiness of men shall be humbled” (Is 2:17);⁵¹ “Suffer me, therefore, that I may lament my sorrow a little, before I go and return no more to a land that is dark and covered with the mist of death, a land of misery and darkness, where the shadow of death and no order but everlasting horror dwelleth” (Jb 10:20–2);⁵² “The dead shall not praise thee, O Lord, nor any of them that go down to hell” (Ps 113:25).⁵³ The extended texts developed from these and similar verses could be used by people outside the monastic workshop or without long apprenticeship in the use of the tools and the ladder. Peter Damian addressed his reflections on the terrors of death and judgment, the sufferings of the damned in hell and the joys of the heavenly Jerusalem to a certain Blanche, whom he characterized as a still young and beautiful aristocratic widow who had renounced the world to become a nun;⁵⁴ John of Fécamp and Anselm both sent copies of their meditations to individuals wishing to use them for their private devotions; among the documented addressees are monks and nuns, including Agnes of Poitou (ca. 1024–1077), the widow of Emperor Henry III (d. 1056) who entered a convent at some time in the 1060s, but also Matilda of Tuscany (1045–1115), a prominent laywoman and powerful ruler of northern Italy.⁵⁵ Nonetheless, even recent entrants to the cloister and lay readers were assumed to possess sufficient skill to be able to develop the texts into further meditations of their own. Peter Damian exhorted Blanche to

⁵⁰ John of Fécamp, Libellus 4, PL 40:904. Ps 119 is sung during the Vespers of the Office for the Dead. ⁵¹ Peter Damian, letter 66, Briefe, ed. Reindel, 2:264; Letters, trans. Blum, 3:55–6. ⁵² Rupert of Deutz, De meditatione mortis 1.9, PL 170:366. The verses from Job are in the lessons of the Nocturnes of the Office for the Dead. ⁵³ Anselm, Meditation 1, SAO 3:79: “Neque enim ‘mortui laudabunt te, domine, neque omnes qui descendunt in infernum’ ”; Prayers and Meditations, trans. Ward, 224. The psalm is 115:17 in the Masoretic numbering. ⁵⁴ Peter Damian, letter 66, Briefe, ed. Reindel, 2:248, 258–5, 268; Letters, trans. Blum 3:40, 50, 58–9, who suggests tentatively that “Blanche” may be a pseudonym for Agnes of Poitou, the widow of Emperor Henry III (Letters 3:40 n. 2). ⁵⁵ For John of Fécamp, see Wilmart, “Deux préfaces spirituelles”; the prefaces in question are to an anonymous nun and to Agnes of Poitou. In Anselm’s case it is documented that he sent copies of his meditations to Matilda of Tuscany, and also to Adelaide, almost certainly Adeliza (d. before 1113), a daughter of William the Conqueror who was probably a nun of Saint Léger at Préaux; he also sent copies to monks such as his friend Gundulf (d. 1108) at Bec; see his letters in SAO 3:4, 135–6, 5:256; Prayers and Meditations, trans. Ward, 90, 106; also Fulton, From Judgment to Passion, 147–8, 170–3.

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“meditate carefully” (suptiliter meditare) on what he had written for her; Anselm invited Matilda to compose meditations of her own on the model of the ones he sent her, and to read “only as much as is considered sufficient to stir up the affections to prayer.”⁵⁶ Thus, although the genre of ready-made meditations reached certain classes of devout individual outside the workshop of the monastery, it still presupposed acquaintance with monastic practices of reading and rhetorical composition. Above all, meditational texts like those by John of Fécamp and others did not prescribe a method for making meditations. Such a method was provided by Bonaventure. The extent to which his regimens of spiritual exercise transformed monastic orthopraxis into a predefined procedure is revealed by their leading metaphors. Although the tools-and-ladder metaphors of the Benedictine Rule, which Bonaventure knew and admired, continued to be used, the valency of the words was entirely changed.⁵⁷ The artisanal metaphors no longer articulated a conception of spiritual exercise that likens it to a craft activity practiced in and sustained by a specific form of communal life; they described instead the ordered stages and the overall direction and goal of a method that might be applied anywhere. Not only were the traditional metaphors transvalued through being given these new and different connotations; under certain conditions they were demetaphorized, becoming terms in a technical vocabulary which assigned to them precise definitions and literal denotations. Both tendencies, transvaluation and demetaphorization, are on display in the use of the word gradus, “step,” in Bonaventure’s most widely disseminated scheme of spiritual exercise, De triplici via.⁵⁸ The scheme lays down three paths for the

⁵⁶ Peter Damian, letter 66, Briefe, ed. Reindel, 2:265; Letters, trans. Blum, 3:56. Anselm, letter to Matilda of Tuscany, SAO 3:4: “In quibus quamvis quaedam sint quae ad vestram personam non pertinent, omnes tamen volui mittere, ut, si cui placuerint, de hoc exemplari eas possit accipere. . . . Nec debet intendere lector quamlibet totam earum legere, sed tantum quantum ad excitandem affectum orandi, ad quod factae sunt, sentit sibi sufficere.” Prayers and Meditations, trans. Ward, 90: “Some of [the prayers and meditations] are not appropriate to you, but I want to send them all, so that if you like them you may be able to compose others after their example. . . . It is not intended that the reader should feel impelled to read the whole, but only as much as is considered sufficient to stir up the affections to prayer, which is what they are made for.” ⁵⁷ Bonaventure quotes the Rule approvingly when, for example, he is encouraging the devout soul to remain steadfast through the many trials it must endure in this life; Soliloquium 2.16, Opera omnia 8:50: “Unde, revera, ut ait beatus Benedictus, quamvis in initio arcta sit via, quae ducit ad vitam, processu tamen temporis inaestimabilis delectationis dulcedine dilatatur.” Trans. Etzkorn, 290: “ ‘Truly,’ as blessed Benedict says, ‘although in the beginning the path which leads to life is narrow, with the passing of time it is broadened by the sweetness of ineffable pleasure.’ ” The citation is adapted from Benedict, Regula prologus 48–9, ed. Hanslik, 9, where the monks are told that although theirs is a hard vocation, “non ilico pauore perterritus refugias uiam salutis, quae non est nisi angusto initio incipienda. Processu uero conuersationis et fidei dilatato corde inenarrabili dilectionis dulcedine curritur uia mandatorum dei.” Rule, trans. White, 9: “You should not for that reason be frightened off and run away from the path of salvation, which has to be narrow at the beginning. As we make progress in our way of life and faith, as our heart expands with the inexpressible sweetness of love, we shall run along the path of God’s commandments.” ⁵⁸ For the manuscript circulation of De triplici via, see note 5 to this chapter.

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soul to follow in its pursuit of spiritual perfection. The purgative way (via purgativa) purifies the soul of sinful inclinations; the illuminative way (via illuminativa) leads it to acknowledge God as the source of all goodness; the perfective or unitive way (via perfectiva, via unitiva) brings it to oneness with God.⁵⁹ For each of these ways Bonaventure prescribes three spiritual exercises, one in each of the modes of meditation, prayer, and contemplation, giving a program of nine exercises in total.⁶⁰ These exercises are in turn composed of individual “steps” or gradus, and it is as steps in the exercises of contemplation that the last things, associated in Benedict’s Rule with tools of good works and rungs on the ladder of humility, make their appearance. Contemplation is distinguished from meditation in Bonaventure’s view because it offers a foretaste of the life to come: whereas in meditation the mind directs its attention to something, in contemplation it leaves its embodied existence behind and passes over (transire) to experience the beatitude of God’s chosen ones in heaven.⁶¹ This experience is accompanied by the traditional eschatological affects of fear and desire. “Fear as one gazes on every aspect of judgment” is the second step of contemplation in the purgative way; “desire-inspiring paradise” and “fearsome hell” are the affective results of making the fourth and fifth steps of contemplation in the illuminative way; finally, “watchfulness on account of the swiftness of the groom’s arrival” is the first step of unitive contemplation, an allusion to the allegory of the last judgment in the New Testament parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins (Mt 25:1–13).⁶² An obvious difference from the Rule is that gradus is here a step along a path, rather than a step on a ladder.⁶³ Less obvious, but more important, is that Bonaventure’s steps are arranged in an order that is systematic as well as ⁵⁹ Bonaventure, De triplici via prologus 1, Opera omnia 8:3; Threefold Way, trans. Etzkorn, 90. ⁶⁰ The structure and contents of De triplici via are analyzed by Bonnefoy, “De triplici via,” pt. 1, 243–64; Schlosser, “Life and Works,” 34–9. ⁶¹ Bonaventure, De triplici via 1.18, 3.1, Opera omnia 8:7, 11–12; Threefold Way, trans. Etzkorn, 103, 114–16. In making the distinction, Bonaventure is following older sources. According to Bernard of Clairvaux and the Victorines, meditatio (also called consideratio) is the intentional direction of the mind to some question or object, whereas contemplatio is true and certain insight, by which the soul comes into the possession of what it sought in meditation. The terminology was not consistently applied, however, and contemplatio sometimes provided a generic designation for meditation and contemplation together. Cf. Bernard of Clairvaux, De consideratione 2.2.5, SBO 3:414; Hugh of St. Victor, De modo dicendi et meditandi 8, PL 176:879; Richard of St. Victor, De contemplatione (Benjamin maior) 1.3–4, ed. Aris, [8]–[10]; see also Bonnefoy, “De triplici via,” pt. 1, 311–59; Schlosser, introduction to transl. of De triplici via, 30–1. Bonaventure is also prone to this freer, less technical usage, which equates contemplation with meditation or “consideration”: the contemplating soul is instructed to “consider” (considera) various matters (De triplici via 3.3, Opera omnia 8:12–13; Threefold Way, trans. Etzkorn, 118–19); it asks out loud: “What good is such a sad meditation [tam lamentabilis meditatio]?” (Soliloquium 3.10, Opera omnia 8:55; trans. Etzkorn, 307). For further examples, see Bougerol, Lexique, s.vv. contemplatio, meditatio. ⁶² Bonaventure, De triplici via 3.2–6, Opera omnia 8:12–14; Threefold Way, trans. Etzkorn, 116–24. ⁶³ Bonnefoy, “De triplici via,” pt. 1, 228–43, points out that the metaphors of the ways and their steps have a long tradition in Christian writing on spiritual perfection dating back to Clement of Alexandria and Origen. Yet because of its prominence in the medieval West, the Benedictine Rule with its ladder of humility was likely to be the text with which Bonaventure and his readers most readily associated the metaphor of steps in a spiritual progress.

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sequential. The steps that make up Benedict’s ladder of humility rank from first and lowest to twelfth and highest; in terms of what they refer to, however, there is no apparent reason why, for example, steps nine, ten, and eleven (“keep [your] tongue in check and refrain from speaking”; “avoid being easily provoked to laughter”; “speak gently and without laughter, but with humility and seriousness”) should be in that particular order, or why they are placed above step eight (“do only what is commended by the common rule of the monastery and the example of your superiors”) rather than below it, or indeed why steps nine and ten are even needed when their precepts are repeated and subsumed under step eleven.⁶⁴ Bonaventure, by contrast, designs his steps as a system in which no later step is possible unless the preceding ones are first completed. To give an example, each of the seven steps of contemplation in the perfective way names a property of Christ, prescribes the appropriate mental or affective state for its contemplation, and describes the resulting effect on the contemplating soul. Schematically, the components of the steps are: 1. The swiftness (promptitudo) of Christ’s coming— watchfulness (vigilantia)—fill the soul with worrisome thoughts (sollicitare); 2. The certainness (certitudo) of Christ’s coming—confidence (confidentia)—comfort (comfortare) the soul; 3. Christ’s sweetness (dulcedo)—desire (concupiscentia)—incite ardor (inflammare); 4. Christ’s exalted rank (celsitudo)—mental excess (excedentia)—elevate (elevare) the soul; 5. Christ’s beauty (pulchritudo)— gratification (complacentia)—quiet and satisfy (quietare) the soul; 6. Christ’s fullness (plenitudo)—happiness (laetitia)—delight (delectare) the soul; 7. Christ’s strength (fortitudo)—attachment (adhaerentia)—cement (conglutinare) the contemplating soul to Christ, and cause it to say: “Who then shall separate us from the love of Christ?” (Rom 8:35).⁶⁵ Later effects presuppose earlier ones: comfort presupposes a mind filled with cares and worry; quieting satisfaction that the soul’s passions have first been stirred up; attachment that the contemplating soul has already been elevated high enough to encounter the exalted object of attachment and takes delight in it. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that Bonaventure is able to say of the exercise in its entirety that “there is order to these steps; you must not stop before reaching the topmost step, nor can that one be reached except by way of the intermediary steps, which are all interconnected.”⁶⁶ A third and very revealing difference is that it is not always clear whether the word gradus is still a metaphor, or is being used literally with the specialized meaning “step in the execution of a procedure.”⁶⁷ The reason for the uncertainty is ⁶⁴ Benedict, Regula 7.55–66, ed. Hanslik, 50–1; Rule, trans. White, 25. ⁶⁵ Bonaventure, De triplici via 3.6, Opera omnia 8:14; Threefold Way, trans. Etzkorn, 122–4. ⁶⁶ Ibid. 3.7, Opera omnia 8:15: “In his enim gradibus ordo est, nec status est ante ultimum, nec ad illum pervenitur nisi per gradus intermedios, et mutuo intra se positos.” My translation, more literal than Etzkorn, 124. ⁶⁷ It no more makes sense to say that gradus in the meaning “step in the execution of a procedure” is a metaphor than it makes sense to say that the English word mouse is metaphorical when it refers to the handheld device used for moving the cursor around a computer screen; both are examples of words

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that the context which determines the relevant meaning of the word and whether it is being used literally or metaphorically is ambivalent. In the Rule, the context is the ladder that the workman climbs to the top; the word gradus accordingly must mean “rung” but is being used metaphorically, because Benedict is patently not talking about an actual ladder and its rungs, but about something else which the reader may be expected to associate with the idea of a rung: a level of attainment which, like mounting the rung of a ladder, brings one nearer to a desired goal and, just as climbing a ladder can be arduous and there is always the danger of losing one’s foothold, requires hard work to achieve as well as constant vigilance to maintain. In De triplici via, matters are complicated because there is not one context in play, but two: that of the path (via) and that of the system of three times three exercises; the former gives gradus its primary meaning “step made with the feet,” whereas the latter assigns to it the secondary meaning of “step in the execution of a procedure.” If the first context is taken as determinative, both via and gradus are metaphors, since Bonaventure is not talking about making step after step along an actual path, but about incremental progress toward a spiritual goal; if the second context is felt to be the dominant one, gradus is being used literally in its secondary meaning, since it is not aiming to draw the reader’s attention to anything outside of that meaning’s conventionally accepted scope. The language of metaphor has been replaced by the technical vocabulary of a specialist jargon. The same equivocation between metaphorical and literal usage is found in another of Bonaventure’s regimens for the soul, the Itinerarium mentis in Deum, and contributes to the dazzling complexity of its rhetoric.⁶⁸ The Itinerarium sets out a system of spiritual exercises which will enable the human mind to progress by stages from perceiving the traces of God in the natural world to contemplating God directly. The progress and its stations are imaged in an allegory: the interpretation of persons, things, and events in the Bible as signifying something other than what they are, with the consequence that the words which

being used to refer to something within the conventional scope of their respective lexical meanings, which speakers have expanded beyond the primary ones of “step made with the feet” or “small rodent of the genus Mus.” Donald Davidson, in his famous essay “What Metaphors Mean,” insisted that the difference between a literal expression and a metaphor is one of use, not meaning; whether they are used literally or metaphorically, the words in question have only their lexical meaning. To develop my example further: the learner of English who encounters the word mouse in the computer context encounters no metaphor, but an additional lexical meaning of the word; on the other hand, readers of Shakespeare who notice that the mouse in the title of Hamlet’s play The Mousetrap refers to his murderous uncle Claudius do not learn a new meaning of the word (something like “nefarious male relative”), they recognize that the word with the meaning “small rodent” is being used metaphorically or, as Hamlet puts it, “tropically” (Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, Arden edition, 3.2.231). ⁶⁸ For the place of the treatise in Bonaventure’s corpus, see Schlosser, “Life and Works,” 32–4.

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name the actually intended referents must be understood as metaphors.⁶⁹ The sixwinged seraph that Isaiah saw in a vision (Is 6:2), the six steps leading up to Solomon’s throne of ivory and gold (1 Kgs 10:18–19), the six days during which Mount Sinai was covered by a cloud before God revealed himself to Moses on the seventh (Ex 24:16), the six days that Jesus waited before going up the mountain for his transfiguration (Mt 17:1–2)—each of these sets of six, wings (alae), steps (gradus), and days (dies), is said to be a “figure” (figura) which signifies the “six successive stages [gradus] of illumination” by which the human mind is “led in a most orderly fashion . . . to the quiet of contemplation.”⁷⁰ These stages consist in the consideration, in sequence, of all the domains in which God may be detected and known: in nature round about us; in the sensory activity within us; in the exercise of the mind in theoretical knowledge; in the exercise of the mind when it is reformed by grace and aligned with the divine purpose; in reason, which deduces God’s unity from a consideration of the concept of being; in faith, which is convinced that God is necessarily triune through considering the concept of goodness. After completing these six stages, the mind reaches a seventh and final one, corresponding to the sabbath-day rest after the six days of creation; in this last stage, the mind is quiet and human affect passes over into God in an experience of spiritual and mystical ecstasy.⁷¹ The word gradus occurs on both sides of the allegory. It names one of the sets of six under interpretation, the steps of Solomon’s throne, and it names that which the throne-steps are said to signify, the stages of illumination. The gradus of the allegorical throne are metaphorical usage, since they do not refer to what is within the conventional boundaries of their meaning: steps of ivory and gold or indeed any other precious material from which actual steps of a regal throne might be fashioned. The gradus of illumination on the other hand are literal usage, because it is contextually appropriate to construe the word as referring to something within the accepted scope of its meaning, which can include steps of a method as well as material steps leading up to a throne. This dual usage characterizes all of the vocabulary of craft that the Itinerarium borrows from the Benedictine Rule: not just gradus, “rung, step,” but also scala, “ladder,” and opifex, “artisan”; it is what makes Bonaventure’s language so complex and difficult, because the same words require to be understood now as metaphor, now as literal usage. The toand-fro between literal and metaphorical usage in the introductory passages of the ⁶⁹ The definition of allegory as a metaphor-set which means one thing but must be understood as referring to another, for example the ship guided to safe harbor by its helmsman as an allegory of the state and its good government, was well established in Greek and Roman rhetoric before the technique was appropriated by hellenized Christians as a method of Bible interpretation that facilitated the incorporation of the Jewish scriptures into the worldview of the new religion. See Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, 1:330–92, esp. 332–49; Lubac, Exégèse médiévale, pt. 1, esp. chaps. 6, 8. ⁷⁰ Bonaventure, Itinerarium 1.5, Opera omnia 5:297; Journey, trans. Cousins, 61. ⁷¹ On the program of ascent in the Itinerarium, see Delio, “Bonaventure’s Synthesis,” 370–88; Karnes, Imagination, 82–92, 99–110.

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Itinerarium is worth tracking in detail, because it discloses the transformation of monastic orthopraxis into a predefined procedure while at the same time revealing Bonaventure’s transvaluation of old metaphors into intuitively graspable images of the new method. In the prologue to the Itinerarium, Bonaventure recounts how, during a retreat to La Verna in central Italy, he was reminded that this was the place where the sixwinged seraph of Isaiah’s vision appeared to Francis of Assisi in the form of the crucified Christ.⁷² He continues by explaining that the seraph’s wings “may be understood” (intelligi possunt) as six “suspensions” (suspensiones, a word that can denote the hanging of convicted criminals on a cross as well as built structures supported by arches or vaulting)⁷³ by which a soul may ascend to the highest peace “as if by steps” (quasi gradatim); the wings moreover are an “image” (effigies) which “suggests [insinuat] the six steps of illumination [sex illuminationes scalares] that begin from creatures and lead up to God.”⁷⁴ Here, the adverb gradatim, “step by step” and the adjective scalaris, “relating to a ladder, composed of rungs” are literal usage: ascending wing by wing to the highest level of illumination is likened to the act of climbing the steps of a ladder one by one. When the words make their next appearance, however, they do so in a paradoxical constellation whose components cannot logically co-exist in the same possible world, because some of them are metaphorical, others literal. In the first chapter of the Itinerarium, Bonaventure says that the “steps of the ascent into God” (divinae ascensionis gradus) will be revealed to those people who pray to God for illumination. The steps will then be discerned in the universe of created things, which is a “ladder by which we can ascend into God” (scala ad ascendendum Deum) because created things are vestiges and images of their divine creator; the steps will also be found in Christ, whom Bonaventure characterizes as “our ladder” (scala nostra) because his threefold substance, corporeal, spiritual, and divine, corresponds to the “threefold existence of things: in matter, in mind, and in the Eternal Art.”⁷⁵ Steps and ladder are straightforwardly metaphors whose combination yields a vivid and immediately understood image of the process through which the mind may come by stages to know God; the artisan, however, whose existence is implicit in the reference to eternal art (ars aeterna) has an equivocal status. On the one hand, to describe the person who practices the art that brought forth all creation as an artisan would be to use a metaphor for God. On the other hand, it must be borne in mind that this particular art, the ars aeterna, is not a metaphor, but a well-defined term in Bonaventure’s theological system: it denotes the exemplary ⁷² Bonaventure, Itinerarium prologus 2, Opera omnia 5:295; Journey, trans. Cousins, 54. Bonaventure recounts the vision in his life of Francis, the Legenda maior 13.3, Opera 8:542–3; Life, trans. Cousins, 305–6. ⁷³ See Oxford Latin Dictionary s.v. suspensio. ⁷⁴ Bonaventure, Itinerarium prologus 3, Opera omnia 5:295; Journey, trans. Cousins, 54–5. ⁷⁵ Ibid. 1.2–3, Opera omnia 5:297; trans. Cousins, 60–1.

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principles of all created things, and these principles, which are divine, achieve their expression through Christ, the Word of God made material in the guise of a human being. To imply, as Bonaventure does in this passage, that God the artisan has set up the ladder of Christ and is standing at the top of its steps is therefore not—or not only—to offer a metaphor or image of divinity; it is a precise reference to a trinitarian and christological doctrine which states that Christ the Son and Word is the medium in which God the Father expresses his exemplary principles and through which created things lead back to these same principles in God.⁷⁶ In the context of this doctrine, “artisan” and “eternal art” are literal terms for what God is and what God practices. The next examples occur in the allegory already discussed. The six steps of Solomon’s throne signify six stages of illumination by which the mind advances to the quiet of contemplation; the first occurrence of gradus in the allegory is a metaphor, the second is a literalism with the extended meaning of “step in an ordered and methodical progress.”⁷⁷ The latter usage is maintained through the following appearances of the word. Just as there are six steps in the ascent to God so, reasons Bonaventure, there are six corresponding levels (gradus) in the powers of the soul: the senses, imagination, reason, understanding, intelligence, and the “spark of conscience.”⁷⁸ The final occurrences of tools-and-ladder vocabulary appear to switch back to metaphor, although the usage is impossible to settle one way or the other. Bonaventure exhorts his readers to climb “step by step” (gradatim) to the height of the mountain where “the God of gods is seen in Sion” (Ps 83:8), and to mount the “first step” (primum gradum) of “Jacob’s ladder” (scala Iacob) by “presenting ourselves to the whole material world as a mirror through which we may pass over to God, the supreme Craftsman” (ponendo totum istum mundum sensibilem nobis tanquam speculum, per quod transeamus ad Deum, opificem summum).⁷⁹ The steps in the mountainside and the ladder with its rungs leading up to heaven, where the chief artisan resides, are metaphors of the mind’s contemplative progress toward a climactic encounter in mystical ecstasy with God; at the same time, because the stages of that progress have been spelled out in order and systematically correlated with the powers of the soul, steps and ladder can also be understood as having a literal application, meaning something like “stage” and “system facilitating progressive degrees of cognition.” This dual usage, metaphorical and simultaneously literal, extends to the word opifex, “artisan, craftsman.” It is a metaphor of God; yet because Bonaventure considers both the universe of things (rerum universitas) and the smaller world (minor mundus) of the human mind to be genuinely scalar structures which God

⁷⁶ ⁷⁷ ⁷⁸ ⁷⁹

See Hayes, “Bonaventure’s Trinitarian Theology,” 220–1; Benson, “Christology,” 273–4. Bonaventure, Itinerarium, 1.5, Opera omnia 5:297; Journey, trans. Cousins 61. Ibid. 1.6, Opera omnia 5:297; trans. Cousins, 62. Ibid. 1.8–9, Opera omnia 5:298; trans. Cousins, 63.

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has contrived so as to lead back to him,⁸⁰ it is at the same time no metaphor to refer to God as the “supreme Craftsman.” The collocation of words for step, ladder, and artisan in this case is not paradoxical, as it was in the preceding example of a literal artisan setting up metaphorical ladders in Christ and the universe; it is equivocal, because all three words, gradus, scala, and opifex, are simultaneously metaphorical and literal usage. The rhetoric of the Itinerarium thus demetaphorizes while at the same time accomplishing the transvaluation of metaphors inherited from monastic discourse. On the one hand, the artisanal metaphors of the Benedictine Rule are absorbed into the technical vocabulary of a method: steps, ladder, and artisan respectively denote precisely defined stages in a procedure, the structure of creation, and its skillful creator. On the other hand, the same words continue to be used metaphorically. The steps of the throne, the ladders of Christ and the universe, the supreme artisan who has set up the ladders—all provide vivid and intuitively graspable images of the method and what it is for. Yet unlike Benedict’s tools and ladder, Bonaventure’s metaphors do not evoke a way of life, a vocation which gives meaning and purpose to spiritual exercise: the workshop with its artisans laboring away until the day they receive their wages. They evoke instead the application of a method whose execution may be arduous, but whose systematic design guarantees attainment of the goal. “We have,” says Bonaventure as he catches a moment’s breath before tackling the seventh and final step of the ascent, “passed through the six contemplations like the six steps of true Solomon’s throne by which we arrive at peace . . . It now remains for our mind . . . to transcend and pass over not only this sense world but even itself. In this passing over, Christ is the way and the door [via et ostium]; Christ is the ladder and the vehicle [scala et vehiculum].”⁸¹ The combination with metaphors of passage, connection, and conveyance foregrounds the facilitative aspect of the ladder. It is the hierarchical order of creation which enables the mind to climb higher.

3. “Philosophy is the meditation of death” From as early as the fifth century  the word philosophia, “philosophy” was regularly applied in the Latin-speaking West to the monastic way of life; likewise the agent noun philosophus, “philosopher” and the verb philosophari, “to philosophize” came to designate a monk and the practice of the monk’s vocation ⁸⁰ Ibid. 1.2, 5, Opera omnia 5:297; trans. Cousins, 60, 61. For the definition of minor mundus as anima nostra, “our [human] soul,” cf. ibid. 2.3, Opera omnia 5:300; trans. Cousins, 70. ⁸¹ Ibid. 7.1, Opera omnia 5:312: “His igitur sex considerationibus excursis tanquam sex gradibus throni veri Salomonis, quibus pervenitur ad pacem . . . restat, ut . . . [mens] transcendat et transeat non solum mundum istum sensibilem, verum etiam semetipsam; in quo transitu Christus est via et ostium, Christus est scala et vehiculum.” Trans. Cousins, 110–11.

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respectively.⁸² The usage reflected the assimilation by Christianity of a GrecoRoman conception of the philosophic life according to which the pursuit of wisdom was associated with the ascetic traits of self-denial, detachment, and otherworldliness. In its Christian monastic application, philosophia stood for ascetic discipline practiced in a community which, following the example of the apostles, renounced private property, turned away from the world, and strove to be the anticipatory image of the fellowship of the saints in heaven.⁸³ The application of the terminology to a form of life modeled on apostolic community might seem a contradiction in terms, given that the apostle Paul had been opposed to philosophers and philosophy. In the only occurrences of the words in the New Testament, he disputed vehemently with “certain philosophers of the Epicureans and of the Stoics” (Acts 17:18), and warned the faithful to “beware lest any man cheat you by philosophy and vain deceit, according to the tradition of men, according to the elements of the world, and not according to Christ” (Col 2:8). Yet because Paul also claimed that the created world presented human understanding with visible evidence of the invisible realities of God (Rom 1:20), it was possible to argue that he provided a warrant and a basis for philosophical endeavor; and because he proclaimed that “all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” were hidden in Christ (Col 2:3), it was possible for Christians to assert that their religion was a higher kind of philosophy, one whose followers were better able to grasp the supreme truth than even the sharpest pagan minds.⁸⁴ Hence it became common in monastic discourse for the noun philosophia to be qualified by adjectives such as “Christian,” “spiritual,” “divine,” “celestial,” or “Pauline”—epithets which expressed the distinctness as well as the superiority of a wisdom whose basic teachings were precisely the ones that Paul had professed as certain truth in front of his audience of Epicureans and Stoics at Athens: the existence of the one transcendent God, the resurrection of the dead, and universal judgment (Acts 17:23–32).⁸⁵ Pauline “philosophy” thus had a distinctly eschatological cast from the outset. In the monastery, philosophy was wholly and explicitly equated with remembrance of the last end, thanks to a definition which monks learned in the schoolroom: philosophia est meditatio mortis, “philosophy is the meditation of ⁸² For the lexical material, see Leclercq, “ ‘Philosophie chrétienne’ ”; Leclerq, Love of Learning, chap. 6. ⁸³ On the continuity of pagan and Christian conceptions of the philosophic life in early monasticism in general, see Hadot, Exercices spirituels, 59–74. In the West, thanks to the influence of Augustine, who was deeply suspicious of the notion of individual perfection, Christian “philosophy” came to be realized as a form of community; see Markus, End of Ancient Christianity, 72–81. ⁸⁴ This is essentially Augustine’s argument in De civitate Dei 8.9–10, ed. Dombart and Kalb, 1:334–6; City of God, trans. Dyson, 324–7, where the same verses from Paul are quoted to demonstrate that even Christians unacquainted with philosophical technicalities are already in possession of the truth to which the Platonists—in Augustine’s view, the most advanced of the pagan schools of philosophers— merely approximated. ⁸⁵ Leclercq, “ ‘Philosophie chrétienne,’ ” 222–4.

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death.” Cassiodorus, describing the curriculum to be followed at his own monastery of Vivarium around the middle of the sixth century, singled out this definition from a list of alternatives as the one “better fitted to Christians who trample down the lusts of this world and live a life of principle in a likeness of the homeland to come”; his definition and his reasoning were repeated throughout the Middle Ages by influential writers on education such as Isidore of Seville, Alcuin, Hrabanus Maurus, and Hugh of St. Victor.⁸⁶ The phrase “meditation of death” encompassed a number of devotional practices and epistemological theories, reflecting the various meanings of the word meditatio in classical and medieval Latin. Like its English cognate, meditatio could denote the action of mentally reflecting on something.⁸⁷ Meditating on death in this sense not only aroused fear and desire, it led to an increase in knowledge and wisdom: about the inevitability of death, and its overcoming through Christ’s sacrificial death on the cross. It was for these reasons that Rupert of Deutz admonished his own soul to ponder these themes and in this way pass the time that remained to it on earth “according to the life of a wise man, which consists in meditation on death.”⁸⁸ But meditatio could also mean the “premeditation” or mental rehearsal of an action, even physical practice at a skill with a view to mastering it completely.⁸⁹ Monastic philosophy conducted as meditatio mortis in this second sense was a rehearsal for actual death, performed by mentally separating the soul and its various faculties from the influence of the corporeal senses. As with mental deliberation, this “practice at dying” brought cognitive gains, since a soul no longer distracted by the flux of sense ⁸⁶ Cassiodorus, Institutiones 2.3.5, ed. Mynors 110–11: “Philosophia est divinarum humanarumque rerum, in quantum homini possibile est, probabilis scientia. aliter, philosophia est ars artium et disciplina disciplinarum. rursus, philosophia est meditatio mortis: quod magis convenit Christianis qui, saeculi ambitione calcata, conversatione disciplinabili, similitudine futurae patriae vivunt, sicut dicit Apostolus: In carne enim ambulantes, non secundum carnem militamus, et alibi: Conversatio nostra in caelis est.” Institutions, trans. Halporn, 190: “Philosophy is the demonstrable (insofar as it is humanly possible) knowledge of divine and human matters. Alternatively, philosophy is the art of arts and discipline of disciplines. Or again, philosophy is a preparation for dying, which is better fitted to Christians who trample down the lusts of this world and live a life of principle in a likeness of the homeland to come, as the Apostle says: ‘For though we walk in the flesh, we do not make war according to the flesh’ [2 Cor 10:3]; and elsewhere, ‘Our city is in heaven’ [Phil 3:20].” See also Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae 2.24.9, ed. Lindsay; Alcuin, De dialectica 1, PL 101:952a; Hrabanus Maurus, De universo 15.1, PL 111:416a; Hugh of St. Victor, Didascalicon 2.1, ed. Buttimer, 24. The inclusion of three received definitions of philosophy (they may all be found in Cicero, cf. Tusculan Disputations 1.26.64, 1.30.74, 5.3.7, trans. King, 74–5, 86–7, 430–1), one of which is specified as appropriate for monks, may reflect the possibility that Cassiodorus wrote an earlier draft of Book 2 of the Institutes for a secular readership. See Troncarelli, Vivarium, 12–21, for the genesis, date, and structure of the work. ⁸⁷ Cf. Oxford Latin Dictionary; Thesaurus Linguae Latinae; Niermeyer, Mediae latinitatis lexicon minus, s.vv. meditare, meditatio. See also note 61 to this chapter. ⁸⁸ Rupert of Deutz, De meditatione mortis 1.1, PL 170:357: “Quid nunc magis, o anima? Saltem abhinc eruditior esto, et quod reliquum est temporis, vive secundum vitam sapientis, quae est meditatio mortis.” ⁸⁹ These meanings, already present in classical Latin, are also current in late, patristic, and medieval Latin; see, in addition to the sources quoted in note 87 above, Blaise, Dictionnaire latin-français des auteurs chrétiens; Novum Glossarium Mediae Latinitatis, s.v. meditatio. The word could refer concretely to rhetorical exercises or military drill.

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data and the impulse to react to them would be free to contemplate eternal truth and reality. Such an exercise in virtual dying was already equated with the essence of the monk’s vocation by John Cassian (ca. 360–ca. 435), one the founding figures of the institution of monasticism in the West; in his Institutes, a handbook for monks living in communities, he wrote that just as the crucified Christ abandoned all interest in worldly things both past and present, “we too, crucified in the fear of the Lord, should be dead to all these things, that is not only fleshly vices but even their possibilities, keeping the eyes of our mind fixed there, where we must hope from moment to moment to pass away.”⁹⁰ As a metaphor for the contemplation of transcendent reality by a soul disencumbered of the cares of the body, the phrase meditatio mortis had a Platonic background. In the Phaedo, Plato’s dialogue on the immortality of the soul and the nature of the afterlife, Socrates utters his famous claim that “those who fasten on to philosophy in the right way are deliberately busying themselves with nothing other than dying and being dead.”⁹¹ By this he meant that philosophers attempt to detach themselves as far as they can from the influence of the body and the bodily senses, so that their souls may be alone by themselves and contemplate the forms: the timeless and unchanging archetypes that constitute the paradigmatic structure of the sensible world. This cognitive exercise is a preparation for actual death (which Socrates, under sentence of execution, is about to undergo), since the philosopher who has steadfastly practiced her vocation in this way will have been purifying her immortal soul in readiness for the day when it will be released from the body for real and forever; when that happens, it will be able to devote itself to wisdom without distraction or diminution.⁹² Later on in the same dialogue, Socrates returns to the theme: a soul has been “philosophizing in the right way” during this life, he says, if it has avoided unnecessary commerce with the body, if it has been gathered into itself, and if it has contemplated the forms as pure intellectual objects. This habitus of ascetic contemplation is described metaphorically as meletē thanatou: the “exercise” or, since the Greek noun meletē has a similar semantic range to Latin meditatio, “meditation of death.”⁹³ ⁹⁰ Cassian, De institutis coenobiorum 4.35, ed. Petschenig, 73: “ita nos quoque timore domini crucifixos oportet his omnibus, id est non solum carnalibus uitiis, uerum etiam ipsis elementis mortuos esse, illic habentes oculos animae nostrae defixos, quo nos sperare debemus momentis singulis migraturos.” Monastic Institutes, trans. Bertram, 62. On Cassian’s role in the formation of western monasticism, see Chadwick, John Cassian; Markus, End of Ancient Christianity, chap. 12. The Institutes were familiar to Cassiodorus; he recommended them in Institutiones 1.29.2, ed. Mynors, 74; Institutions, trans. Halporn, 162–3. ⁹¹ Plato, Phaedo 64a, ed. Rowe, 31: “kinduneuousi gar hosoi tunchanousin orthōs haptomenoi philosophias lelēthenai tous allous hoti ouden allo autoi epitēdeuousin ē apothnēskein te kai tethnanai.” For the translation, see Rowe’s commentary, ibid., 135; cf. Phaedo, trans. Gallop, 9. ⁹² Plato, Phaedo 64d–69d, ed. Rowe, 32–9; trans. Gallop, 9–16. ⁹³ Ibid. 81a, ed. Rowe, 56; trans. Gallop, 32: “the cultivation of death.” Ancient Greek meletē can mean “care, attention; practice, exercise, drill; rehearsal”; cf. Liddell and Scott, Greek-English Lexicon; Thesaurus Linguae Graecae; Lampe, Patristic Greek Lexicon, s.v. In Latin ascetic texts from the fourth and fifth centuries the associated verb meletein is regularly translated as meditare (cf. Carruthers, Craft,

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The Phaedo was unavailable to all but a small number of readers in the Latin Middle Ages; its epistemological position nevertheless was familiar in monastic circles, thanks to an indirect tradition which consisted of references by classical and patristic authors to what they labeled either Plato’s or Socrates’ definition of philosophy.⁹⁴ The dialogue also exerted a spectral influence on western Christianity through the legacy of Neoplatonism, which informed discussions of how the human mind might know and form a concept of God.⁹⁵ Augustine, who knew Plato’s philosophy via the mediation of Roman authors such as Cicero and through translations of the Neoplatonists Plotinus and Porphyry, evidently had some version of the meletē thanatou metaphor in mind when he interpreted God’s words “Man shall not see me and live” (Ex 33:20) in a way that runs counter to the meaning suggested by their context. Far from being the consequence of catching sight of God’s face, death is said by Augustine to be the precondition for an intellectual vision of divinity: “This vision is granted only to him who in some way dies to this life, whether he quits the body entirely or is turned away and carried out of the bodily senses.”⁹⁶ Augustine’s theory of intellectual vision predicated on a virtual “dying to this life” was developed in the twelfth century into highly differentiated and philosophically complex epistemologies of contemplation. Both Hugh of St. Victor and Richard of St. Victor defined contemplation as the direct intuition of truth by a mind that has detached itself from sensible objects and mental representations of objects. Hugh ranked the three terms meditatio, speculatio, and contemplatio according to a scale of progressive abstraction: in meditatio, or thought directed at a specific problem, the mind was still prone to

82, 106), and Socrates’ metaphor was rendered in Latin as meditatio mortis; cf. the twelfth-century translation of Phaedo by Henricus Aristippus, ed. Minio-Paluello, 38, and the many references by classical and medieval Latin writers to Plato’s concept of philosophy, for example Ambrose, De excessu fratris 2.35, ed. Faller, 268; Jerome, letter 60.14.2, Epistulae, ed. Hilberg, 1:566; Rupert of Deutz, Commentarius in librum Ecclesiastes 3, PL 168:1255, commenting on Eccl 7:1–3. ⁹⁴ See, in addition to the authors cited in the preceding note, Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 1.30.74, trans. King, 86–7; Seneca, Ad Marciam de consolatione 23.2, Moral Essays, trans. Basore, 2:84–5; Macrobius, Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis 1.13.5, ed. Willis, 52. The phrase “indirect tradition” is from Klibansky, Continuity, 22–9; for citations and references to Plato in Latin writers of the first five centuries , see also Gersh, “Medieval Legacy,” 3–13. A translation of the Phaedo by Apuleius (second century ) was no longer available after the sixth century, and Henricus Aristippus’ twelfth-century version is transmitted in only a small number of manuscripts (Klibansky, Continuity, 27); the dialogue entered mainstream intellectual consciousness only through Marsilio Ficino’s fifteenth-century translation of the complete Platonic oeuvre. ⁹⁵ On the legacy of Platonism in Latin Christian theology and philosophy, see Beierwaltes, Denken des Einen; Gersh, Middle Platonism and Neoplatonism; Gregory, “Platonic Inheritance”; Beierwaltes, Platonismus; Gersh and Hoenen, Platonic Tradition. ⁹⁶ Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram 12.27.55, ed. Zycha, 422: “sed nisi ab hac uita quisque quodammodo moriatur siue omnino exiens de corpore siue ita auersus et alienatus a carnalibus sensibus . . . subuehitur uisionem.” Literal Meaning of Genesis, trans. Taylor, 2:219. I discuss Augustine’s theory and epistemology of noncorporeal modes of seeing at greater length in section 5 of Chapter 2, esp. 99–101. For his knowledge of Plato and reading in Neoplatonist philosophy, see Gersh, “Medieval Legacy,” 24–30.

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troublesome surges of the carnal passions; speculatio raised it above these perturbations so that it might admire God’s creation; contemplatio took it beyond creation to contemplate the creator himself.⁹⁷ Richard described contemplatio as a dynamic process in which the object of cognition was grasped holistically in the free flight (liber volatus) of the soul, which rose from sensibilia, objects of sense perception represented in the imagination, to intelligibilia, things that cannot be perceived by the senses, but are intelligible to reason, to reach the lofty realm of intellectibilia: things that surpass reason, yet are registered by the intelligence.⁹⁸ This highest contemplation affords a glimpse of the vision of God which will be available to the blessed in the life to come; it is thus an anticipatory exercise in dying which fills the soul with yearning for actual death: “Therefore the soul that is perfect and assiduously devoted to contemplating the highest things should look forward at every hour with the greatest desire to the time of its pilgrimage and going out from this penitentiary.”⁹⁹ Bonaventure was at one with the practitioners of monastic philosophia in his conviction that the supreme goal of religious striving was wisdom, and that the highest wisdom available to humans was knowledge of God achieved in contemplation.¹⁰⁰ Yet for him, the product of a university rather than a monastic education, philosophy was not a metaphor for a life of self-mortification in an ascetic community, such that philosophia and meditatio mortis could be regarded as largely coterminous; it was an academic discipline which supplied the technical categories and epistemological theories that enabled meditation to be conducted systematically and with the guarantee of making gains in wisdom. This technicization of the philosophical aspect of meditation amounts to a complete transformation of the fundament of spiritual exercise: no longer does the practice of meditation depend on an institution with its particular way of life, but on a philosophically informed method and theory. In order to understand the philosophical basis of Bonaventure’s regimens for the soul, and thus appreciate the true scale of the transformation they represented, we must look more closely at the

⁹⁷ Hugh of St. Victor, De modo dicendi et meditandi 8–9, PL 176:879. ⁹⁸ Richard of St. Victor, De contemplatione 1.3–4, 1.7, ed. Aris, [8]–[10], [14]–[15]. A complete exposition of this work (also known as the Benjamin maior) in its philosophical context is offered by Aris in the study that accompanies his edition, 45–130. ⁹⁹ Richard of St. Victor, De contemplatione 4.10, ed. Aris, [97]: “Debet ergo anima perfecta et assidue summorum contemplationi dedita omni hora peregrinationis suae terminum ergastulique huius egressum cum summo desiderio exspectare.” ¹⁰⁰ Bonaventure distinguishes between several kinds of knowledge of God. “Wisdom without any form” (sapientia nulliformis), revealed through contemplation, is the highest kind; it ranks above “manifold wisdom” (sapientia multiformis), disclosed in the understanding of the Bible, as well as above the “wisdom which assumes every form” (sapientia omniformis), achieved by discovering the creator in the created universe, and “uniform wisdom” (sapientia uniformis), present in the immutable rules of philosophical reason. Bonaventure, Collationes in Hexaëmeron 2.8, Opera omnia 5:337; Collations on the Six Days, trans. de Vinck, 26; also Cullen, Bonaventure, 24–6.

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academic philosophy to which he was exposed during his university studies and to which he contributed as a university teacher himself. When Bonaventure began his studies at the University of Paris in or around 1235, the philosophical culture he found there had been revolutionized during the past hundred years: by the rise of the scholastic method, by the reception and assimilation of the complete corpus of Aristotle, and by the consolidation of universities as an educational institution.¹⁰¹ These developments transformed the traditionally Augustinian and Neoplatonist philosophical bases of Latin Christian thought. Scholastic methods of dialectical reasoning were applied to conflicting statements by theological authors with the aim of developing a deeper understanding of Christian scriptures and doctrine;¹⁰² translations of Aristotle and his Arab-speaking commentators brought a new level of technical sophistication to accounts of ontology, psychology, and epistemology;¹⁰³ university intellectuals incorporated these innovations in a new kind of theology: one that presented its knowledge in a systematic order, and proceeded logically from principles to conclusions, so as to give “an account of the things of faith that is intelligible to reason.”¹⁰⁴ It was as a rational science in the service of theology that Bonaventure encountered philosophy in the work of his teacher, Alexander of Hales, and other Franciscan theologians in Alexander’s circle at Paris;¹⁰⁵ it was with an understanding of metaphysics as a “knowledge of fundamental causes” affording opportunities for the exploration of theological questions that Bonaventure began to practice philosophy himself during his Paris “regency”— the period between the late 1240s and his election as minister general of the Franciscan order in 1257, during which time he was engaged in university teaching, first as a bachelor of arts expounding the Bible and the Sentences of Peter Lombard, then as a promoted master of theology.¹⁰⁶ Inherent in such an

¹⁰¹ For overviews of these developments, see Cullen, “Bonaventure’s Philosophical Method,” 124–33; Dod, “Aristoteles latinus”; Marrone, “Universities”; Verger, “Universities and Scholasticism”; Schumacher, Divine Illumination, 85–100, 103–9. A concise account of Bonaventure’s university education and career is given by Schlosser, “Life and Works,” 9–14. ¹⁰² See Novikoff, Disputation, chaps. 2, 4, 5. ¹⁰³ See Black, “Intellect”; Hasse, “Faculties”; Lohr, “Interpretation”; Panaccio, “Mental Representation”; Smith, “Perception”; Wippel, “Essence and Existence.” ¹⁰⁴ LaNave, “Bonaventure’s Theological Method,” 96. ¹⁰⁵ For Alexander’s reception of Aristotelian ideas through translations of the commentaries by Ibn Sina (Avicenna), see Schumacher, Divine Illumination, 105–8; for a general introduction to his philosophy, see Cullen, “Alexander of Hales.” ¹⁰⁶ For works written by Bonaventure during his “regency,” see Schlosser, “Life and Works,” 19–26. The definition of metaphysics as the knowledge of fundamental causes is from Aristotle, Metaphysics 1.3 [983a], trans. Tredennick, 1:16–17: “tōn ex archēs aitiōn epistēmē” (knowledge of primary causes); Bonaventure quotes it in his commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard: Commentarium in III. Librum Sententiarum, dist. 35, art. 1, q. 1 conclusio, Opera omnia 3:774: “sic etiam dicit Philosophus, quod sapientia est ‘cognitio rerum altissimarum.’” (The Philosopher also says the same thing, that wisdom is the “knowledge of the highest things.”) “The Philosopher” was a standard way of referring to Aristotle, who is the most frequently cited philosophical source in all of Bonaventure’s writings; cf. Bougerol, Introduction, 27–30; Elders, “Les citations d’Aristote.”

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approach was the danger that philosophical reason might displace theology and faith as the highest locus of truth. For if metaphysics supplied a “knowledge of fundamental causes,” the epistemic claims of theology and faith might appear diminished in consequence, since the things under explanation would be subalternate to the principles that explain them. In order to avoid this outcome, Bonaventure distinguished carefully between philosophy and theology, and theology and contemplation, assigning to each one its sphere of competence, and subordinating the first term in each pair to the second. In the case of philosophy, the subordination is threefold: systemic, entelechial, and epistemic.¹⁰⁷ In the systems of knowledge that Bonaventure describes in his writings, philosophy always occupies a subordinate position to theology, and also to contemplation. In his Commentary on the Sentences (ca. 1250–2), Bonaventure progressively refines the notion of wisdom (sapientia), distinguishing between more common and more precise usages of the word, and declaring each usage appropriate to a particular branch of knowledge. Wisdom as the word is commonly used is appropriate for philosophy, which Bonaventure defines as general knowledge of things (cognitio rerum generalis); if the focus is narrowed to wisdom as it is less commonly understood, we find ourselves in the domain of one particular division of philosophy: metaphysics, which involves knowledge of the highest causes (cognitio causarum altissimarum). Philosophy is excluded, however, from the scope of what Bonaventure calls the “proper” and “more proper” understandings; wisdom in these senses is knowledge of God according to piety (cognitio Dei secundum pietatem) and experiential knowledge of God (cognitio Dei experimentalis), in other words theology and contemplation, respectively.¹⁰⁸ The same positioning of philosophy relative to theology and contemplation is found in another work of Bonaventure’s which may date from the same period as the Commentary. In De reductione artium ad theologiam (On the Reduction of the Arts to Theology), a short treatise on the relation of the various branches of human knowledge, the arts and sciences are distinguished and classified according to the light of their knowledge,

¹⁰⁷ This issue touches on the notorious “Bonaventure problem” which has been debated by scholars since Gilson and turns on the question whether there is a genuinely philosophical content in Bonaventure’s thought. On one side of the debate are those who doubt whether a mode of inquiry whose ultimate ends are determined by theology can ever be fully or properly philosophical; the most notable proponent of this view is Steenberghen, Aristotle and the West, 154–62; Steenberghen, La Philosophie au XIIIe siècle, 242–71. Those who take the other side argue that thanks to Bonaventure’s clear demarcation of a sphere of philosophical competence there is a component to his thought that may be considered purely as philosophy; cf. Gilson, Philosophy of St. Bonaventure, chap. 15; Quinn, Bonaventure’s Philosophy, 787–896; Speer, Triplex veritas, 19–21, 126–34; Speer, “Medieval Philosophy”; Cullen, Bonaventure, 32–5; Cullen, “Bonaventure’s Philosophical Method,” 141–6. For my purposes it is not necessary to take a side in the controversy, since even the staunchest defenders of a philosophical content in Bonaventure’s thought do not seek to deny that he regarded philosophy as a heteronomous discipline whose inquiries are completed and perfected by theology. ¹⁰⁸ Bonaventure, Commentarium in III. Librum Sententiarum dist. 35, art. 1, q. 1 conclusio, Opera omnia 3:774; Cullen, “Bonaventure’s Philosophical Method,” 133–6.

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which may be interior or exterior, higher or lower.¹⁰⁹ Within this hierarchy, the light of philosophical knowledge (lumen cognitionis philosophicae) occupies an intermediate position. Because it is interior and illuminates the intellectual truth (veritas intellectualis), it ranks above the exterior light of the mechanical arts, which satisfy human wants and needs, and the inferior light of the senses, which illuminates the objects of perception; on the other hand its place in the hierarchy is below the superior light of Holy Scripture, which illuminates the suprarational truth that confers salvation (veritas salutaris).¹¹⁰ Philosophy is entelechially subordinated to theology because Bonaventure sets up its fields of inquiry in such a way as to make them lead to the discovery of still more fundamental principles which always turn out to be theological in nature; the fullest understanding of philosophical issues is achievable therefore only in the light of theological knowledge.¹¹¹ In De reductione, Bonaventure divides philosophy into three major branches. Rational philosophy, comprising grammar, rhetoric, and logic, deals with the truth of propositions (veritas sermonum), which it clarifies by seeking principles of understanding (rationes intelligendi). Natural philosophy, subdivided into physics, mathematics, and metaphysics, is concerned with the truth of things (veritas rerum); its methods are directed at knowing the causes of being (ad cognoscendas causas essendi). Moral philosophy, finally, whose branches are personal, domestic, and political ethics, establishes the truth of conduct (veritas morum) and illuminates the order by which we should live (ordo vivendi).¹¹² All three fields of inquiry are properly philosophical, but no matter whether the investigation is of propositions, things, or conduct, the philosopher will always find in them traces of God, whose “manifold wisdom . . . lies hidden in all knowledge and in all nature.”¹¹³ Rational philosophy, by inquiring into the principles of understanding, leads ineluctably to the first principle of understanding, which is the wisdom of the eternal Word, equated by Bonaventure with God the son; natural philosophy inquires into the causes of created beings and thus leads to the first principle of being itself, which is the power of God the father; moral philosophy’s consideration of how we should live leads to the first principle of the good, which is the goodness of Holy Spirit.¹¹⁴

¹⁰⁹ The content and argument of De reductione are summarized by Cullen, Bonaventure, 29–32; Cullen, “Bonaventure’s Philosophical Method,” 136–40. It has been considered a late work (cf. Bougerol, Introduction, 163), but similarities to the academic genre of the principium or inaugural lecture suggest it may have been written by Bonaventure for his inception as master of arts at Paris, which took place some time in the 1250s; see Benson “Literary Genre”; Hammond, “Dating.” ¹¹⁰ Bonaventure, De reductione 1–5, Opera omnia 5:319–21; Reduction, trans. Hayes, 37–45. ¹¹¹ Cf. LaNave, “Bonaventure’s Theological Method,” 102–4. ¹¹² Bonaventure, De reductione 4, Opera omnia 5:320–1; Reduction, trans. Hayes, 41–3. ¹¹³ Ibid. 26, Opera omnia 5:325: “multiformis sapientia Dei . . . occultatur in omni cognitione et omni natura.” Trans. Hayes, 61. For the concept of manifold wisdom, see note 100 to this chapter. ¹¹⁴ Bonaventure, Itinerarium 3.6, Opera omnia 5:305; Journey, trans. Cousins, 84–5. Cf. De reductione 4, Opera omnia 5:320–1; Reduction, trans. Hayes, 41–3.

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Because philosophy’s objects of investigation invariably derive their first principle from one or other person of the Holy Trinity, a complete knowledge of them is impossible without knowledge of the Trinity. But the Trinity does not belong to the realm of the intelligibile, the things that are understandable through the exercise of the philosopher’s natural reason; it belongs to the realm of the credibile, the “things of faith” which are revealed in scriptures and interpreted by theologians.¹¹⁵ Thus philosophy is epistemically subordinate to theology, because it cannot achieve the fullest possible knowledge of its own objects, understanding, being, and the good, without recourse to the insights of theology.¹¹⁶ Yet theology does not represent the completion of all knowledge; there is an epistemic mode that ranks higher still and to which theological knowledge of God according to piety (cognitio Dei secundum pietatem) is in its turn subordinate; this highest mode is the so-called experiential knowledge of God (cognitio Dei experimentalis). It is a gift of the Holy Spirit and is achieved in a state of ecstatic contemplation when the human mind has gone beyond the limits of its own powers and of itself. In the Breviloquium, another treatise from his period of teaching at Paris, Bonaventure calls this contemplative mode of knowing God notitia excessiva, “knowledge got from having gone beyond” or “excessive knowledge”; divine grace bestows the gift of this knowledge on a mind that has gone beyond itself in a process of “speculation” (speculatio) or intellectual contemplation, which Bonaventure images in the very same step metaphors that he deploys in the Itinerarium to describe the mind’s journey to God: Contemplation was given to the prophets through revelation . . . while other just men obtain it through speculation, which starts from the senses, reaches the imagination, proceeds from imagination to reason, from reason to the intellect, from the intellect to understanding, and from understanding to wisdom, that excessive knowledge which begins in this life to reach fulfillment in eternal glory. Of such successive steps is Jacob’s Ladder made, with its top reaching to heaven; and the throne of Solomon upon which is seated the King most wise, truly peaceful and full of love, the Bridegroom most fair, who is all delight, upon whom angels desire to look, toward whom holy souls aspire as the hind longs for running waters [Ps 41:2]. ¹¹⁵ LaNave, “Bonaventure’s Theological Method,” 84, 86–7, 109–11. ¹¹⁶ It is from this perspective that Bonaventure declares philosophy to be defective. In Soliloquium 4.24, Opera omnia 8:65, he writes that the soul that has elevated its reason to contemplate what it would be like to gaze in the mirror of eternity will see human science and learning revealed in their true perspective: “Ibi revera stultitia videbitur et reputabitur Platonis theoria, Aristotelis philosophia, Ptolomaei astronomia, quia quidquid hic de veritate intelligimus, minima pars eorum est, quae ignoramus.” Trans. Etzkorn, 337: “There it will be seen how stupid will be considered the theories of Plato, the philosophy of Aristotle, the astronomy of Ptolemy, because whatever of truth we learn there, it is but the smallest part of all those things of which we are ignorant.” On Bonaventure’s attitude to the errors of pagan philosophy, see Cullen, “Bonaventure’s Philosophical Method,” 156–61; LaNave, “Bonaventure’s Theological Method,” 104.

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  Contemplatio in Prophetis fuit per revelationem . . . in aliis vero iustis reperitur per speculationem, quae incipit a sensu et pervenit ad imaginationem et de imaginatione ad rationem, de ratione ad intellectum, de intellectu ad intelligentiam; de intelligentia vero ad sapientiam sive notitiam excessivam, quae hic in via incipit, sed consummatur in gloria sempiterna. Et in his gradibus consistit scala Iacob, cuius cacumen attingit caelum; et thronus Salomonis, in quo residet Rex sapientissimus et vere pacificus et amorosus ut sponsus speciosissimus et desiderabilis totus; in quem desiderant Angeli prospicere, et ad quem suspirat desiderium sanctarum animarum, sicut cervus desiderat ad fontes aquarum.¹¹⁷

The analogy between Bonaventure’s notitia excessiva, Platonic meletē thanatou, and Victorine contemplatio is striking: the soul is temporarily released from embodied existence or even from its own reason, so as to contemplate eternal realities or divinity itself.¹¹⁸ Yet it would oversimplify matters greatly to say that Bonaventure merely relocated the traditional notion of epistemic gain through meletē thanatou from the domain of philosophy to the threshold that leads from theology to contemplation. It is in fact not necessary for the subject of knowledge to leave philosophy behind in order to encounter the eternal and divine, because in Bonaventure’s hierarchy of knowledge, the light of the lower disciplines derives from the divine light which is the origin of all illumination and shines down on every art and science.¹¹⁹ So far as the philosophical sciences are concerned, he declares that they “all have certain and infallible rules, like rays of light shining down upon the mind from the eternal law. And thus our mind, illumined and flooded by such brilliance, unless it is blind, can be led through itself to contemplate that eternal light.”¹²⁰ This is a version of the philosophical doctrine of knowledge by divine illumination, which posits that human reason requires some kind of supernatural assistance if its judgments are to count as certain and infallible.¹²¹ In Bonaventure’s formulation of the doctrine, if the mind is to be capable of judgments that it knows could never not be true, it must have recourse to an infallible principle of judgment; it cannot however derive this principle from

¹¹⁷ Bonaventure, Breviloquium 5.6, Opera omnia 5:260; trans. de Vinck, 206. I have translated notitia excessiva as “excessive knowledge,” because although it is less idiomatic than de Vinck’s “ecstatical knowledge,” it makes the derivation from excedere, “go beyond, surpass, exceed,” more transparent. For the meaning of the term, see Bougerol, Lexique, s.vv. excessus, speculatio. ¹¹⁸ For Platonic meletē thanatou and Victorine contemplatio, see above, 42–3. ¹¹⁹ Bonaventure, De reductione 1, Opera omnia 5:319; Reduction, trans. Hayes, 37. ¹²⁰ Bonaventure, Itinerarium 3.7, Opera omnia 5:305: “Omnes autem hae [sc. philosophicae] scientiae habent regulas certas et infallibiles tanquam lumina et radios descendentes a lege aeterna in mentem nostram. Et ideo mens nostra tantis splendoribus irradiata et superfusa, nisi sit caeca, manuduci potest per semetipsam ad contemplandam illam lucem aeternam.” Journey, trans. Cousins, 85. ¹²¹ General overviews of the history of the doctrine are Pasnau, “Divine Illumination,” and (with a focus on the Middle Ages) Noone, “Divine Illumination.”

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its perceptions of the world, or from the abstract concepts it extracts from these perceptions, or from the propositions into which it combines its concepts. The principle is instead divine and thus extrinsic to human reason; the philosopher’s mind can nevertheless be “led through itself [manuduci . . . per semetipsam]” to contemplate it. Bonaventure’s philosophy therefore leads where Plato wanted philosophy to lead: to the contemplation of unchanging transcendent reality. The idea that there is an indispensable supernatural component in the exercise of reason had already been developed into an epistemological theory by ancient Greek philosophy. Plato argued in the Phaedo that human knowledge of the world is capable of transcending the unstable flux of sense perceptions because the mind possesses an a priori knowledge of the forms, the ideal exemplars of everything in the world, which was imparted to our souls before we were born.¹²² The seminal figure in the establishment of divine illumination as a specifically Christian doctrine was Augustine, who appropriated Platonic ideas about a supernatural source of human cognition and developed them into an account that would be definitive for Latin Christianity down to the thirteenth century. Augustine’s doctrine presents numerous problems of interpretation: whether his statements about divine illumination, which are dispersed across several of his writings, constitute a fully worked out theory, or at least presuppose one; whether he believed that divine illumination supplied the mind with its actual objects of cognition, or just its concepts; whether he thought illumination had a primarily regulative function, which consisted in supervising the mind’s exercise of its natural powers of reasoning.¹²³ Two fundamental aspects of Augustine’s account appear nonetheless to be beyond dispute. First, divine illumination supplies the human mind with epistemic warrant: the justification that gives the mind the assurance that its judgments are true. Since the truth is unalterable, Augustine argues, it must derive from a source no less unalterable; such a source cannot be located in the human mind itself, or in the intersubjective agreement of minds, because human beings are corrupted by original sin and their minds subject to mutability; the source must instead be the light of God, in whom “there is no change nor shadow caused by turning” (cf. Jas 1:17) and who is “the immutable truth which is higher than our minds.”¹²⁴ Second, divine illumination is not ¹²² Plato, Phaedo 74a–76e, ed. Rowe, 46–50; trans. Gallop, 23–7. ¹²³ Schumacher, Divine Illumination, 4–16, collects the relevant passages from Augustine’s texts and reviews the problems of interpretation as well as conflicting solutions that have been proposed from the Middle Ages down to the present day. For medieval commentary on Augustine, see also Marrone, Light of Thy Countenance. ¹²⁴ Augustine, Confessiones 4.15.25, 12.25.35, ed. Verheijen, 53, 235: “errores et falsae opiniones uitam contaminant, si rationalis mens ipsa uitiosa est. Qualis in me tunc erat nesciente alio lumine illam inlustrandam esse, ut sit particeps ueritatis, quia non est ipsa natura ueritatis, quoniam tu inluminabis lucernam meam, domine; deus meus, inluminabis tenebras meas, et de plenitudine tua omnes nos accepimus. Es enim tu lumen uerum, quod inluminat omnem hominem uenientem in hunc mundum, quia in te non est transmutatio nec momenti obumbratio”; “si ambo uidemus uerum esse quod dicis et ambo uidemus uerum esse quod dico, ubi, quaeso, id uidemus? Nec ego utique in te nec tu

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extrinsic to the mind, as if God stamped the warrant of certitude on the mind’s reasoning from without. On the contrary, Augustine considers divine illumination to be an intrinsic capacity of the human mind, which was created in God’s image; human beings lost this capacity through the disorder and perversion of the mind’s faculties that were the consequence of original sin and the Fall, but it may be recovered through faith in Christ.¹²⁵ The reception of Aristotelian psychology in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries put the Augustinian doctrine under strain. Notwithstanding Aristotle’s much debated reference to the active intellect (nous poietikos) as something “immortal [athanaton] and everlasting [aidion],” and therefore perhaps supernatural and divine, his treatise De anima (On the Soul) offered medieval intellectuals an otherwise entirely naturalistic account of how the mind applies its various faculties—the common sense, imagination, intellect—to the business of abstracting stable truths from the evidence of the physical world relayed to it by the corporeal senses.¹²⁶ The challenge to divine illumination posed by this theory gave rise to attempts at synthesis, which broadly speaking fall into one of two types. On the one hand, there is the intrinsicist position of Thomas Aquinas, who reconfigured Augustine’s divine illumination so that it functioned as the source of the mind’s ability to abstract ideas from sensory evidence in the manner theorized by Aristotle. It is divine illumination, according to Aquinas, that imparts to the human mind its innate capacity to recognize the truth of basic axioms of reasoning, such as the principle of noncontradiction, as soon as it is confronted with an instance where they apply.¹²⁷ Bonaventure’s synthesis represents the second type of response, one that posits divine illumination as an extrinsic influence on the operations of the mind, indispensable for achieving certainty, but superadded to the mind’s natural faculties.¹²⁸ There is nothing problematic, in in me, sed ambo ipsa quae super mentes nostras est incommutabili ueritate.” Confessions, trans. Chadwick, 67–8, 265: “Errors and false opinions contaminate life if the reasoning mind itself is flawed. That was my condition at that time. For I did not know that the soul needs to be enlightened by light from outside itself, so that it can participate in truth, because it is not itself the nature of truth. You will light my lamp, O Lord. My god, you will lighten my darknesses (Ps 17:29), and of your fullness we have all received (Jn 1:16). You are the true light who illuminates every man coming into this world (Jn 1:9), because in you there is no change nor shadow caused by turning.” “If both of us see that what you say is true and that what I say is true, then where, I ask, do we see this? I do not see it in you, nor you in me, but both of us see it in the immutable truth which is higher than our minds.” In the first passage, Augustine is recollecting his flawed capacity for knowing the truth when still a pagan; in the second, he is discussing truth as an epistemological problem. ¹²⁵ Schumacher, Divine Illumination, 16–18, 25–65. ¹²⁶ On the medieval reception of Aristotelian psychology, through Latin translations and also Arabic commentaries, see Schumacher, 88–100. On the controversial interpretation of On the Soul 3.5 [430a], trans. Hett, 170–71, see Pasnau, “Divine Illumination,” section 2. ¹²⁷ Pasnau, Aquinas, 302–10; my formulation is a condensed citation of his characterization of the innate capacity on p. 307. For a somewhat different, though still intrinsicist, account of Aquinas’s theory of divine illumination, see Schumacher, Divine Illumination, 154–80. ¹²⁸ The following relies principally on Cullen, Bonaventure, 77–87; Noone and Houser, “Saint Bonaventure.” See also Cullen, “Bonaventure’s Philosophical Method,” 146–50; Karnes, Imagination, chap. 2; Schumacher, Divine Illumination, 18–21, 110–15, 143–53.

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Bonaventure’s view, with the Aristotelian account of the process whereby the mind abstracts universals from the particulars of sense perception; the problem enters at the level of epistemic certitude. “The aspect of knowing that is really difficult to explain seems to be how a mutable mind, which at one time did not exist, could make necessary and immutable judgments about mutable concrete things, or about immutable universals, which still at some time did not exist, for the necessity and immutability of these judgments seems to be of such a nature that they could not not be true at any time. In other words, the judgments made by the mind possess an absolute necessity and certainty so great that they are truly outside of time—they are eternal. For example, there is no time at which it is not true that every dog is a mammal.”¹²⁹ Neither the mind, which is entirely capable of deriving intelligible concepts from the world of things, nor the things thus understood by the mind can be the source of the immutable and eternal truth of a judgment, because neither the mind nor the things are immutable and eternal. The source of epistemic certitude must therefore be God because, Bonaventure reasons, “nothing is absolutely unchangeable, unlimited and endless unless it is eternal; everything that is eternal is either God or in God. If, therefore, everything which we judge with certainty we judge by such a reason, then it is clear that he himself is the reason of all things and the infallible rule and light of truth.”¹³⁰ This divine light of truth radiates from above to illuminate the human mind, giving it the certitude it is not capable of reaching on its own: “If full knowledge requires recourse to a truth that is fully immutable and stable, and to a light that is completely infallible, it is necessary for this sort of knowledge to have recourse to the heavenly art as to light and truth: a light, I say, giving [dantem] infallibility to the knower, and a truth giving [dantem] immutability to the object of knowledge.”¹³¹ From this last statement of Bonaventure’s, it will be apparent that he regarded divine illumination above all as a normative influence on the mind’s exercise of reason: it is the “regulative and motivating principle” (regulans et ratio motiva) of certain knowledge, because it provides the standard of immutability and infallibility which is the necessary condition for certitude in any judgment.¹³² This

¹²⁹ Cullen, Bonaventure, 80. ¹³⁰ Bonaventure, Itinerarium 2.9, Opera omnia 5:301–2: “nihil autem est omnino immutabile, incircumscriptibile et interminabile, nisi quod est aeternum; omne autem quod est aeternum, est Deus, vel in Deo: si ergo omnia, quaecumque certius diiudicamus, per huiusmodi rationem diiudicamus; patet, quod ipse est ratio omnium rerum et regula infallibilis et lux veritatis.” Journey, trans. Cousins, 73. ¹³¹ Bonaventure, Quaestiones disputatae de scientia Christi q. 4 conclusio, Opera omnia 5:23: “Si ergo ad plenam cognitionem fit recursus ad veritatem omnino immutabilem et stabilem et ad lucem omnino infallibilem; necesse est, quod in huiusmodi cognitione recurratur ad artem supernam ut ad lucem et veritatem: lucem, inquam, dantem infallibilitatem scienti, et veritatem dantem immutabilitatem scibili.” Disputed Questions, trans. Hayes, 135. ¹³² Ibid., Opera omnia 5:23; trans. Hayes, 134. Whether Bonaventure additionally considered divine illumination to play a noetic or an ideogenetic role in human cognition, i.e. whether he thought illumination also entered into the mind’s cognition of particulars or its forming of concepts, is controversial; for discussion, see Cullen, Bonaventure, 80–5; Schumacher, Divine Illumination, 151–2.

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understanding of illumination as an extrinsic and regulative influence allowed Bonaventure to harmonize the Christian doctrine with the Aristotelian theory of knowledge by abstraction. Human reason proceeds autonomously and naturalistically, in the manner described by Aristotle, up to and including the stage where it abstracts intelligible concepts from the particulars of sense perception and frames intelligible propositions about those concepts; in order to make the step from intelligibility to epistemic certainty, however, reason must have recourse to the “light which is completely infallible.” Bonaventure’s account of divine illumination simultaneously circumscribes and potentiates philosophy. It circumscribes, because it asserts that philosophical reasoning neither yields full knowledge of first principles nor guarantees the infallibility of its own judgments. It enhances the powers of philosophy, on the other hand, because of Bonaventure’s belief that the activity of philosophizing can make finite and mutable human minds receptive to the infinite and eternal principles of God. The potential of philosophical reason to put the mind in touch with transcendence is exploited for devotional purposes in Bonaventure’s exercise for contemplation in the illuminative way in De triplici via.¹³³ The exercise focuses on Christ’s death, and involves consideration of his passion in seven steps, each one having the same tripartite structure. First a particular aspect of the passion to be contemplated is introduced by an interrogative word or phrase; then the appropriate attitude of contemplation is specified; finally the question implied by the opening interrogative is answered with creedal propositions about Christ and the passion. First, consider who it is that suffers, and submit to him by the assent of reason, in order that you may firmly believe that Christ is truly the son of God, the principle of all things, the savior of humankind, the rewarder of all merits. Second, [consider] what kind of person it is who suffers, and cling to him with the affect of compassion, in order that you may suffer along with the son of God who is totally innocent, meek, noble, and loving. Third, [consider] how great is the one who suffers, and approach him with a gaze of astonishment in order that you may realize that he is of enormous power, beauty, and happiness forever and ever. Stand in awe at the fact that this immense power is reduced to nothing; this beauty is drained of its color; this happiness is tormented; and this eternity is brought to death. Fourth, [consider] for what reason Christ suffers, and so forget yourself in an excess of devotion, because he suffers for your redemption, illumination, and glorification.

¹³³ For the ways and structure of De triplici via, see above, 31–2.

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     Fifth, [consider] in what form Christ suffers, and thus strive to put on Christ by studious imitation. He suffered most freely for his neighbor, most painfully as far as he was concerned, most obediently with regard to God, and most prudently with respect to his enemies. Strive therefore to have the habit of kindness regarding your neighbor, uncompromising effort in discipline regarding yourself, humility in the presence of God, watchfulness regarding the devil: all according to the pattern of imitating Christ. Sixth, you should realize how many sufferings Christ endured, and embrace the cross with a desire for suffering, so that just as he suffered imprisonment as impotent omnipotence, insults as base goodness, mockery as foolish wisdom, punishments as inequitable justice, so you ought to desire the sufferings of the cross, that is the passion filled with wrongs done to things, insults in words, mockery in signs, punishments in torments. Seventh, consider what follows from what Christ suffered, and gaze upon the ray of truth through the eye of contemplation, because from the fact that the Lamb has suffered the seven seals of the book have been opened, according to Revelation 5. This book contains the universal knowledge of things; in it seven things were shut away from humankind, but opened up by the effect of Christ’s passion, namely: astonishing God; intelligible spirit; world perceptible to the senses; desirable paradise; terrible hell; laudable virtue; culpable guilt. Primo considera, quis est qui patitur, et eidem subdere per rationis assensum, ut credas firmissime, Christum veraciter esse Dei Filium, omnium rerum Principium, Salvatorem hominum, Retributorem meritorum omnium. Secundo, qualis est qui patitur, et ei coniungere per compassionis affectum, ut compatiaris innocentissimo, mitissimo, nobilissimo et amantissimo. Tertio, quantus est qui patitur, et ad ipsum egredere per admirationis aspectum et attende, quod immensus est potestate, speciositate, felicitate, aeternitate. Admirare igitur immensam potestatem annihilari, speciositatem decolorari, felicitatem tormentari, aeternitatem mori. Quarto, qua de causa patitur, et te ipsum obliviscere per devotionis excessum, quia scilicet patitur pro tua redemptione, illuminatione, glorificatione. Quinto, quali forma patitur, et Christum inducere per assimilationis studium. Passus est enim libentissime respectu proximi, severissime respectu sui, obedientissime respectu Dei, prudentissime respectu adversarii. Stude igitur ad habendum habitum benignitatis ad proximum, severitatis ad te ipsum, humilitatis ad Deum, perspicacitatis contra diabolum, secundum effigiem imitationis Christi. Sexto, attende, quanta sunt quae patitur, et crucem amplectere per passionis desiderium, ut, sicut passus est vincula ut impotens omnipotentia, convitia ut vilis bonitas, ludibria ut stultus sapientia, supplicia ut iniquus iustitia; sic et tu desideres passionem crucis, hoc est passionem plenam iniuriis in rebus, convitiis in verbis, ludibriis in signis, suppliciis in tormentis.

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  Septimo considera, quid ad hoc consequitur, quod patitur, et veritatis radium intuere per contemplationis oculum: quoniam ex hoc, quod Agnus passus est, septem signacula libri aperta sunt, Apocalypsis quinto. Liber iste est universalis rerum notitia, in qua septem erant clausa homini, quae quidem sunt per passionis Christi efficaciam reserata, scilicet Deus admirabilis, spiritus intelligibilis, mundus sensibilis, paradisus desiderabilis, infernus horribilis, virtus laudabilis, reatus culpabilis.¹³⁴

The interrogatives which introduce each step are derived from the categories of Aristotelian philosophy. For Aristotle, the categories constituted a list of the most general headings or aspects under which it is possible to speak about anything: substance (ousia); what kind (poion); how much (poson); related to what (pros ti); where (pou); when (pote); being in a position (keisthai); having (echein); doing (poiein); undergoing (paschein).¹³⁵ The reception of the Aristotelian corpus and associated Arabic commentaries in the thirteenth century gave rise to a range of views among Latin-speaking intellectuals about whether the categories reflect ways of speaking about reality, or ways of conceptualizing it, or reality itself; there were also differences of opinion over whether all ten of Aristotle’s categories are primary or some at least are derivative.¹³⁶ Yet for all their differences none of the most influential Latin commentators, Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas from the Dominican tradition, John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham from the Franciscan, appears to have doubted that Aristotle’s ten categories are categories. Bonaventure, who never wrote a dedicated commentary on the categories, likewise took the canon for granted; in the Breviloquium, he discusses the categories in their applicability to God, referring to them as though they are a given (“There are ten categories”), before going on to argue that five of them (substance; what kind; how much; related to what; doing) may be attributed to God “insofar as they signify completeness without contradicting divine simplicity,” whereas the other five (where; when; being in a position; having; undergoing) apply only analogically or figuratively, because they properly pertain to bodily and mutable things.¹³⁷ At least six of the ten categories may be discerned in the interrogatives of De triplici via. The questions “how great [quantus] is the one who suffers?” and “how many [quanta] sufferings?” correspond to Aristotle’s category of quantity or ¹³⁴ Bonaventure, De triplici via 3.3, Opera omnia 8:12–13; Threefold Way, trans. Etzkorn, 118–19. ¹³⁵ For an introduction to the categories and the attendant problems of interpretation, see Studtmann, “Aristotle’s Categories.” ¹³⁶ See Gracia and Newton, “Medieval Theories of the Categories,” for an overview and discussion. ¹³⁷ Bonaventure, Breviloquium 1.4, Opera omnia 5:212: “Cum igitur decem sint praedicamenta, scilicet substantia, quantitas, relatio, qualitas, actio, passio, ubi, quando, situs et habere; quinque ultima proprie spectant ad corporalia seu mobilia; ideo non attribuuntur Deo nisi transsumtivo modo et figurativo. Alia vero quinque praecedentia Deo attribuuntur, secundum id quod completionem dicunt, ita tamen, quod divinam simplicitatem non impediunt.” Trans. de Vinck, 42.

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poson, “how much”; “what kind of [qualis] person is it who suffers?” and “in what form [quali forma]?” are questions of quality or poion, “what kind”; the question “what follows from Christ’s suffering?” considers the passion under the category of poiein, what it “does,” namely open the seven seals of the Apocalyptic book; “who [quis] suffers?” inquires into who undergoes the suffering, paschein; “for what reason [qua de causa] he suffers” is a question of relation, pros ti, since to ask about the wherefore of the suffering implies that it is related to someone or something. Finally, the question “who [quis] suffers?” arguably implies the category of substance (ousia) in addition to that of undergoing (paschein), because the answer “Christ the true son of God, the principle of everything, the savior of humankind, the rewarder of all merits” not only identifies the person affected by the passion, but specifies Christ’s nature as “primary substance”—a term applied by Aristotle to entities that are neither “asserted of” nor “found in” something, i.e. are neither universals that may be predicated of more than one thing nor accidental properties of something else; examples of such a substance according to Aristotle are a particular human being or a particular horse.¹³⁸ None of Bonaventure’s predicates of Christ may be asserted of anyone or anything else, because there are no entities other than Christ in the extension of “truly the son of God,” “principle of everything,” “savior of humankind,” “dispenser of all rewards”; nor are they attributes found in anyone or anything else. The armature of the exercise is thus philosophical: a “categorial” analysis of the passion. The consideration of each category leads however not to a rational deduction, but to a creedal and dogmatic proposition which is presented as certain truth. Thus, in every one of the seven steps of illuminative contemplation, the exercise of philosophical reason spills over into truths of revelation which can only be assented to in an act of faith. The same spilling over of philosophy into revelation occurs in Bonaventure’s explanation of the “universal knowledge of things” concealed beneath the seven seals of the Apocalyptic book which “no man, neither in heaven nor on earth nor under the earth, was able to open” (Rv 5:3). Each revelation concerns a creedal proposition relating to what is made manifest in Christ on the cross. The truth of these propositions is ultimately a matter of faith, since it is impossible to reason all the way through to the conclusion—and yet reasons are supplied. The requirement on the person performing the contemplative exercise is therefore not to abandon reason altogether, but to apply it as far as she can, up to the point where reason encounters its limit and illumination takes over to result in final certitude. The secret under the first seal is “astonishing God” (Deus admirabilis); the reason why astonishment and wonder are an appropriate response to the cross is because it is the place where God’s “highest wisdom deceived the devil, [his] highest justice obtained the price of redemption, ¹³⁸ Aristotle, Categories 5 [2a], trans. Cooke, 18–19. For more on this concept, see Studtmann, “Aristotle’s Categories,” section 1.1.

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[his] highest mercy sacrificed the Son for our sakes.”¹³⁹ The second secret is the “intelligible spirit” (spiritus intelligibilis); the cross reveals an intelligible, i.e. conceptually graspable, spiritual content because it displays “how much benevolence there is in respect of the angels” who consented to their Lord’s crucifixion, “how much merit in respect of humans” for whose sake God’s son was crucified, and “how much cruelty in respect of the demons” who suggested the sacrifice.¹⁴⁰ The true nature of the “world perceptible to the senses” (mundus sensibilis) is made manifest in the cross, because it discloses essential facts about the created world which are inaccessible to human observation and reason: the world’s “blindness, since it did not acknowledge the true and highest light”; its “sterility, because it despised Jesus Christ as fruitless”; its “iniquity, because it damned and killed its God and Lord, the innocent one and a friend.”¹⁴¹ The truth of the fourth secret, “desirable paradise” (paradisus desiderabilis), is revealed on the cross because it is the place where Christ, “the pediment of all glory, the spectacle of all happiness, the storehouse of all opulence,” willingly accepted debasement, guilt, and poverty so that humans might be raised to glory, justified despite their guilt, and made copiously rich; the implication is that God would not have willingly suffered so great a sacrifice if paradise were not truly desirable.¹⁴² The fifth secret, “hell is a terrible place” (infernus est horribilis locus), is manifested on the cross because if it was necessary for Christ to suffer want, debasement, ignominy, distress, and wretchedness in order to obliterate sin, it is all the more necessary that the damned in hell should suffer these same things as just recompense for their wickedness.¹⁴³ The sixth secret is “laudable virtue” (virtus laudabilis); the attributes of virtue that make it worthy of praise—its preciousness, beauty, and fruitfulness—are manifest on the cross because Christ sacrificed his life there rather than offend against virtue (proof of how precious it is); he shone out amid the scorn and the insults heaped upon him (proof of virtue’s beauty); his one perfect deployment of virtue had the effect of harrowing hell, opening the gates of heaven, and restoring the earth (proof of the fruits of virtue).¹⁴⁴ Finally, the “abominable nature” (detestabilitas) of the seventh secret, “culpable guilt” (reatus culpabilis), becomes evident in the fact that the guilt’s forgiveness exacted “such a high price, such a tremendous sacrifice, and such a hard medicine,” ¹³⁹ Bonaventure, De triplici via 3.4, Opera omnia 8:13: “Summa enim sua sapientia decepit diabolum, summa iustitia quaesivit redemptionis pretium, summa misericordia pro nobis traditit Filium.” Threefold Way, trans. Etzkorn, 120. ¹⁴⁰ Ibid.: “quantae sit benignitatis quantum ad Angelos, quantae sit dignitatis quantum ad homines, quantae sit crudelitatis quantum ad daemones. Nam Angeli permiserunt crucifigi Dominum suum; Dei Filius crucifixus est propter genus humanum, et hoc ad suggestionem daemonum.” Trans. Etzkorn, 120. ¹⁴¹ Ibid.: “caecitas, quia lucem veram et summam non agnovit; . . . sterilitas, quia Iesum Christum tanquam infructuosum despexit; . . . iniquitas, quia Deum et Dominum suum et amicum et innocentem damnavit et interfecit.” Trans. Etzkorn, 120. ¹⁴² Ibid.; trans. Etzkorn, 120. ¹⁴³ Ibid.; trans. Etzkorn, 121. ¹⁴⁴ Ibid., Opera omnia 8:14; trans. Etzkorn, 121.

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namely that the incarnate God was required to make satisfaction “for [human] arrogance, than which there was none greater, by the most abject degradation; for [human] cupidity, than which there was never any greedier, through the most carefully sought out poverty; for [human] licentiousness, than which none was more dissolute, by the bitterest of pains.”¹⁴⁵

4. “Turn the ray of contemplation” Bonaventure was not the first writer on meditation to address himself to laypeople as well as monastic readers. That had already been done almost 200 years before, by a theologian Bonaventure especially admired.¹⁴⁶ Anselm composed his Prayers and Meditations between 1070 and 1080 and sent copies of these short texts, designed for private devotional reading, to monks and educated laypersons who requested them. In the fifty years after his death in 1109 the collection achieved wide circulation, often augmented by further texts in the same genre, and it was so well known in the thirteenth century that it was bound to offer a point of comparison and reference for Bonaventure.¹⁴⁷ His use of the Prayers and Meditations deserves closer scrutiny, because it reveals how completely his spiritual exercises had transformed the relationship between text and reader in the practice of meditation. Whereas Anselm put the reader in charge of the text, allowing wide scope for individual adaptation and variation of the script, Bonaventure put the text in charge of the reader, whose meditations must follow the exact prescribed order. Two of Anselm’s authentic meditations, “A meditation to stir up fear” (Meditatio ad concitandum timorem) and “A lament for virginity unhappily lost” (Deploratio virginitatis male amissae), evoke the terrors of the last judgment and hell.¹⁴⁸ Bonaventure included three quotations from them in the third spiritual exercise of the Soliloquium, which focuses on death, judgment, and eternal punishment. Like all the exercises of the Soliloquium, it is composed “in simple words for the sake of every simpler person” (propter simpliciores quosque simplicibus verbis) and written in the form of a dialogue between the soul and the

¹⁴⁵ Ibid.: “cum ad sui remissionem indigeat tam magno pretio, tam grandi piaculo, tam difficili medicamento, in tantum, ut Deum et hominem nobilissimum in unitate personae oportuerit satisfacere pro arrogantia, qua nulla fuit elatior, per abiectissimam vilitatem; pro cupiditate, qua nulla fuit avidior, per exquisitissimam paupertatem; pro lascivia, qua nulla fuit dissolutior, per amarissimam acerbitatem.” Trans. Etzkorn, 121. ¹⁴⁶ Anselm was named by Bonaventure as Augustine’s successor in the field of theological dogmatics (De reductione 5, Opera omnia 5:321; Reduction, trans. Hayes, 45), and he is frequently cited in Bonaventure’s writings; see Bougerol, Introduction, 23–30. ¹⁴⁷ For the circulation of the Prayers and Meditations, see note 55 to this chapter. ¹⁴⁸ Anselm, Meditations 1 and 2, SAO 3:76–83; Prayers and Meditations, trans. Ward, 221–9.

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“inner man” who acts as a spiritual director.¹⁴⁹ The soul is directed to meditate in fear and trembling on the last judgment, and to imagine the day when it will be arraigned on every side: by its conscience, which bears witness to its sins; by the elements, which cry out in accusation; by the sufferings that Christ endured on the cross, which speak out against it.¹⁵⁰ The inner man unfolds this terrifying situation to the soul, first with a quotation from Pseudo-Bernard of Clairvaux which describes the predicament of the sinner with no place to hide, then with the following passage from Anselm: Anselm in his Meditations: “O sinful soul, useless and dry wood, destined to eternal fires, what will you say on that day when you will be required to give an account—to the very blink of an eye—of how you have spent all the time allotted to you?” Anselmus in Meditationibus: “O anima peccatrix, lignum inutile et aridum, aeternis ignibus deptutatum, quid respondebis in illa die, quando exigetur a te usque ad ictum oculi omne tempus tibi impensum, qualiter sit a te expensum?”¹⁵¹

The other two Anselm citations are incorporated into the soul’s reaction to the description of hell which the inner man provides so that the soul may contemplate the punishments inflicted on the damned and see “how they are of all kinds, how hard, how horrible, how intolerable they are.”¹⁵² Suitably terrified, the soul implores Jesus for mercy in words taken from Anselm’s “Meditation to stir up fear”: O loving Jesus, in your name grant me mercy; forget my provocative pride, look at this miserable one humbly invoking you. Give benign recognition to what is yours, wipe away what is foreign. O Lord, have mercy on me while there is time for mercy, lest you damn me on the day of judgment. O pie Iesu! propter nomen tuum fac mecum misericordiam; obliviscere superbum provocantem, respice miserum humiliter invocantem; recognosce

¹⁴⁹ Bonaventure, Soliloquium, prologus 4, Opera omnia 8:29; trans. Etzkorn, 220. The voice of the homo interior is derived from Ephesians 3:14–19, which Bonaventure cites as the opening to the Soliloquium. The decision to call the soul’s spiritual guide by this name may also have been influenced by Augustine’s advice in De vera religione 39.72, ed. Daur, 234: “Noli foras ire, in te ipsum redi. In interiore homine habitat ueritas.” (Do not seek to go outside, but return inside you; the truth dwells in the inner man.) ¹⁵⁰ Bonaventure, Soliloquium 3.5, Opera omnia 8:53; trans. Etzkorn, 301–2. ¹⁵¹ Ibid.; trans. Etzkorn, 302. The citation is from Anselm, Meditation 1 (“A meditation to stir up fear”), SAO 3:77; Prayers and Meditations, trans. Ward, 222; its beginning is slightly modified to make it fit the particular circumstances of the dialogue. The preceding citation is Pseudo-Bernard of Clairvaux, Tractatus de interiori domo 22.46, PL 184:531d. ¹⁵² Bonaventure, Soliloquium 3.6, Opera omnia 8:54: “quam sint varia, quam aspera, quam horribilia, quam intolerabilia.” Trans. Etzkorn, 303.

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benignissime quod est tuum, absterge quod est alienum. Miserere, Domine, dum tempus miserendi est, ne damnes in tempore iudicandi.¹⁵³

This entreaty merges seamlessly into the third citation, taken from the “Lament for virginity unhappily lost”: “It is true that my conscience [tells me] that I have merited damnation and my repentance is not sufficient for satisfaction, but it is nonetheless certain that your mercy overcomes every offense.” Anselm says these things in the Meditations. “Verum quidem est, quod conscientia mea meruit damnationem, poenitentia mea non sufficit ad satisfactionem; sed tamen certum est, quod tua misericordia superat omnem offensionem.” Haec Anselmus in Meditationibus.¹⁵⁴

From a thematic and rhetorical point of view, the choice of quotations could not be more apt. Yet with regard to their intended mode of use there is a world of difference between the Prayers and Meditations and the Soliloquium. Anselm’s own preface explains: “The purpose of the prayers and meditations that follow is to stir up the mind of the reader to the love or fear of God, or to self-examination”; the pace of reading should be slow and the manner ruminative, taking in only “a little at a time, with deep and thoughtful meditation”; the reader “should not trouble about reading the whole” of any text, “but only as much as, by God’s help, he finds useful in stirring up his spirit to pray, or as much as he likes”; there is no need to begin at the beginning, instead the reader may “begin and leave off wherever he chooses,” so that he will “not get bored with too much material but will be able to ponder more deeply those things that make him want to pray.”¹⁵⁵ These instructions show that Anselm envisaged readers who were able to do most of the work by themselves: educated readers who could draw on their knowledge of the liturgy and the scriptures and on their rhetorical training to generate their own meditative trains of thought out of whatever segment of text

¹⁵³ Bonaventure, Soliloquium 3.8, Opera omnia 8:54; trans. Etzkorn, 305, citing Anselm, Meditation 1, SAO 3:79; Prayers and Meditations, trans. Ward, 224. ¹⁵⁴ Bonaventure, Soliloquium 3.8, Opera omnia 8:54; trans. Etzkorn, 305–6, citing Anselm, Meditation 2 (“A lament for virginity unhappily lost”), SAO 3:83; Prayers and Meditations, trans. Ward 229. ¹⁵⁵ Anselm, Orationes sive meditationes, prologus, SAO 3:3: “Orationes sive meditationes quae subscriptae sunt, quoniam ad excitandam legentis mentem ad dei amorem vel timorem, seu ad suimet discussionem editae sunt, non sunt legendae in tumultu, sed in quiete, nec cursim et velociter, sed paulatim cum intenta et morosa meditatione. Nec debet intendere lector ut quamlibet earum totam perlegat, sed quantum sentit sibi deo adiuvante valere ad accendendum affectum orandi, vel quantum illum delectat. Nec necesse habet aliquam semper a principio incipere, sed ubi magis illi placuerit. . . . ubi elegerit incipiat aut desinat, ne prolixitas aut frequens eiusdem loci repetitio generet fastidium, sed potius aliquem inde colligat lector propter quod factae sunt pietatis affectum.” Trans. Ward, Prayers and Meditations, 89. Cf. also Anselm’s dedicatory letter to Mathilda of Tuscany, to whom he sent the collection in 1104, SAO 3:4; trans. Ward, Prayers and Meditations, 90.

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they selected.¹⁵⁶ Such programmatic directionlessness is in stark contrast to the directedness of the Soliloquium. Whereas readers of the Prayers and Meditations might decide for themselves whether to read any particular text in its entirety or not, in sequence or not, the “simpler sort” of user to whom Bonaventure addressed his spiritual exercises was not to enjoy any latitude. The general prologue to the Soliloquium describes the reader’s task as a sequential turning of the ray of contemplation in each of four prescribed directions: Through spiritual exercise the devout soul must first turn the ray of contemplation to what is interior to it, so that it may see how it is formed by nature, deformed by sin, and reformed by grace. Second, it must turn the ray of contemplation to external things, so that it may understand how unstable is worldly affluence, how fickle worldly preeminence, and how miserable worldly luxuries. Third, it must turn the ray of contemplation to inferior things, so that it may understand the inevitable necessity of human death, the fearful strictness of the last judgment, and the intolerable suffering of the pains of hell. Fourth, it must turn the ray of contemplation to superior things, so that it may understand and taste the inestimable pricelessness, the ineffable delight, and the unending eternity of heavenly joy. Debet enim anima devota per mentale exercitium contemplationis radium reflectere primo ad interiora sua, ut videat, qualiter sit formata per naturam, deformata per culpam, reformata per gloriam. Secundo debet convertere radium contemplationis ad exteriora, ut cognoscat, quam instabilis sit mundana opulentia, quam mutabilis mundana excellentia, et quam miserabilis mundana magnificentia. Debet etiam tertio radium contemplationis convertere ad inferiora, ut intelligat humanae mortis inevitabilem necessitatem, iudicii finalis formidabilem austeritatem, poenae infernalis intolerabilem poenalitatem. Debet quarto convertere radium contemplationis ad superiora, ut cognoscat et sapiat caelestis gaudii inaestimabilem pretiositatem, ineffabilem delitiositatem et interminabilem aeternitatem.¹⁵⁷

The program combines contemplation of the last things in the third and fourth exercises with two other traditional elements of monastic “philosophy,” self-

¹⁵⁶ For a detailed elucidation of these processes of meditation, see Carruthers, Craft, 103–5, and the remarkable reading of Anselm’s Meditation 1 by Pranger, Artificiality, 115–21. ¹⁵⁷ Bonaventure, Soliloquium, prologus 2, Opera omnia 8:28–9; trans. Etzkorn, 218–19. The ternary schema “formed, deformed, reformed” was already implied by William of St. Thierry, who writes in the Golden Epistle that the natural senses were perverted from their true order by sin, resulting in the “animal” soul of the novice monk; through the discipline of ascetic life in the cell this animal soul may be reformed (reformari) after the image of its creator, and progress to become rational and, ultimately, spiritual (Epistola 88, 146, 195–300, ed. Verdeyen, 246, 258–9, 269–89; Golden Epistle, trans. Berkeley, 41, 59, 78–105).

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examination and contempt for the world, in the first and second.¹⁵⁸ These elements had previously been put together in a meditative scheme by another of Bonaventure’s favorite monastic theologians, Bernard of Clairvaux.¹⁵⁹ In a sermon on Sirach 7:40, Bernard expanded the exhortation to “remember your last end” into no fewer than three imperatives: “Consider your first beginning, pay close attention to your middle days, and be mindful of your last end” (Recole primordia, attende media, memorare novissima tua). The consequence of remembering, “and you shall never sin,” accordingly becomes the third and last element in a chain of outcomes. The thought of how far we have fallen since the beginning, when we were created in God’s image and were equal to angels, will cause us to feel shame; consideration of where we are now, exiled from the garden of heavenly bliss, will induce sorrow; remembrance of the last end will instill fear, which is better than shame and sorrow because it alone leads to wisdom, which we evince when we atone for our past sins and avoid committing fresh ones in future.¹⁶⁰ Similarly, the first exercise of the Soliloquium makes the soul feel ashamed because it has abused its God-given nature; the second leads to sorrow for a life wasted on worldly vanity; the contemplation of the last things in the third not only terrifies the soul but makes it contrite and determined to do good works henceforth.¹⁶¹ In the preamble to the first exercise, the soul admits that it does not know the order (ordo) to follow when meditating on the fourfold matter that has been prescribed for it.¹⁶² The inner man remedies the soul’s ignorance with a quotation from the Meditations of Pseudo-Bernard of Clairvaux: “Many people know many things and are ignorant of themselves; they look to others and desert themselves; seeking God in external things and neglecting what is within them where God dwells. Hence I turn from exterior things to interior things and I rise from inferior things to superior things [ab exterioribus ad interiora redeam et ab inferioribus ad superiora conscendam].”¹⁶³ This imposes the order of the four directions, in such a way moreover that each one functions as preparation for the next. The first exercise, in which the ray of contemplation is turned inward, purifies the eyes of the soul so that they may see clearly for the first time; this clarity of vision will be needed when the soul comes to direct its attention in the second exercise to the outside world: no longer blinded by earthly attractions, the soul will see the world

¹⁵⁸ On self-examination and its roots in classical philosophy, see Hadot, Exercices spirituels, 31, 68–9, and especially Courcelle, Connais-toi toi-même. On contempt for the world, see Leclercq, Love of Learning, chap. 6. ¹⁵⁹ For Bonaventure’s use of Bernard, see Bougerol, “Saint Bonaventure et saint Bernard.” ¹⁶⁰ Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones de diversis 12, SBO 6 pt. 1:127–30; Monastic Sermons, trans. Griggs, 70–4. ¹⁶¹ Bonaventure, Soliloquium 1.8, 2.18, 3.11, Opera omnia 8:32, 51, 55; trans. Etzkorn 232–3, 292–3, 307. ¹⁶² Ibid. 1.1, Opera omnia 8:29; trans. Etzkorn, 220. ¹⁶³ Ibid. 1.2, Opera omnia 8:30; trans. Etzkorn, 223–4. Cf. Pseudo-Bernard of Clairvaux, Meditationes piissimae 1.1, PL 184:485a.

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for what it truly is.¹⁶⁴ The insight thus gained has the effect of directing the soul’s desire to heaven, yet (the soul confesses) its previous attempts at contemplating celestial matters all met with failure. The reason, explains the inner man, was that the soul was not yet ready: “You wanted to partake of consolation before you partook of suffering; you wanted to participate in the rewards before you were an imitator of the virtues.”¹⁶⁵ Hence the necessity of turning the ray of contemplation down to judgment and hell before it may be turned up to paradise. The turns of the ray not only set out the order of the exercises in the program of the Soliloquium, they establish its comprehensiveness. The latter quality is emphasized in a series of metaphors in the prologue. The four directions, inside, outside, down, and up, are “that blessed cross with its four ends” (illa crux beata, quatuor finibus terminata) on which the soul is to hang with Christ while it meditates; they are “that fiery chariot with its four wheels” (ille currus igneus, quatuor rotis consummatus) on which the soul stands and looks out for its faithful friend, and by which it will ascend to the heavenly palace (the allusion is to the chariot of fire that carried Elijah up to heaven in Kgs 2:11); they are the four cardinal points of the compass, in which the soul may walk each day, looking out for its beloved like the bride of the Song of Solomon (3:1); they are the four dimensions of Christ’s love— breadth, length, height, and depth—mentioned in the quotation from Ephesians (3:18) with which the Soliloquium opens.¹⁶⁶ Just as cross, chariot, compass, and love would all be incomplete if any one of their four ends, wheels, points, or dimensions were missing, so the program of four spiritual exercises requires to be followed in its entirety. At the stage where the soul has completed the second exercise and learned everything about the true nature of the world, it exclaims that it is filled now with a great yearning to experience heaven.¹⁶⁷ The inner man however rebukes the soul for its excessive greed and presumptuousness, and explains that the next turn of the ray in the sequence may under no circumstances be omitted: Before you rise above yourself to seek [spiritual] inebriation, it will be salutary for you first to descend in your contemplations to the depths beneath you, so that you may learn to have a reverent fear of your bridegroom, before you begin to enter his privy chamber. Antequam ad quaerendam ebrietatem supra te ascendas, prius per considerationem salubriter infra te descendas, ut discas tuum Sponsum reverenter timere, antequam incipias suum secretum cubiculum introire.¹⁶⁸

¹⁶⁴ Bonaventure, Soliloquium 1.29; 2.8, Opera omnia 8:38–9, 47; trans. Etzkorn, 253–4, 280–2. ¹⁶⁵ Ibid. 2.17, Opera omnia 8:51; trans. Etzkorn, 292. Cf. 2 Cor 1:7. ¹⁶⁶ Ibid. prologus 2, Opera omnia 8:29; trans. Etzkorn, 219. ¹⁶⁷ Ibid. 2.18, Opera omnia 8:51; trans. Etzkorn, 292–3. ¹⁶⁸ Ibid. 2.20, Opera omnia 8:52; trans. Etzkorn, 295. The same point is repeated in the preamble to the third exercise: 3.1, Opera omnia 8:52; trans. Etzkorn, 297.

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Within each single exercise, there is also an order for the soul to follow. In the first exercise, for example, the soul turns the ray of contemplation inside itself by considering three propositions in sequence: “How the nature of the soul is nobly formed by the supreme craftsman” (Quam generose a summo artifice formata sit anima per naturam); “How the soul is perversely deformed by guilt stemming from the will” (Quam vitiose a voluntate deformata sit anima per culpam); “How the soul is graciously reformed in grace by divine goodness” (Quam gratiose a divina bonitate reformata sit anima per gratiam).¹⁶⁹ Each heading contains further concepts, propositions, and images for the soul to ponder in order: the faculties of memory, intellect, and will, with which God has endowed the soul; the five corporeal senses, whose creaturely perceptions have interposed themselves between the soul and God; the face, eyes, ears, mouth, feet, and hands of Christ on the cross, which direct the soul to the source of saving grace.¹⁷⁰ Contemplation of all these points is accompanied by emotional and moral catharsis, as the shame that the soul feels on realizing how it has abused its God-given endowment yields first to revulsion at the sins to which the senses have incited it, then to tears of contrition, which cleanse the soul’s eyes so that they may perceive Christ’s passion; this sight brings consolation and, finally, leads to the love of God.¹⁷¹ An ever more intense love of God is also the goal toward which the soul is progressively directed in the second and third of the spiritual exercises;¹⁷² the fourth and final one stands out, however, for the sheer sophistication of its directions. Every aspect of the soul’s contemplation of heaven is governed and managed by its guide, the inner man. The latter’s first task is to judge whether the time is right to let the exercise begin, for just as it would be fruitless to allow the soul to taste the delights of heaven prematurely, so it would be dangerous to make it wait too long, because the delay might cause it to lose heart altogether.¹⁷³ Having once determined that the moment has arrived and the ray of contemplation may now be turned upwards, the inner man introduces the soul to a new, celestial order of vision. He describes how the citizens of heaven have their own ray of

¹⁶⁹ Ibid., rubrics of 1.3, 1.10, 1.29, Opera omnia 8:30, 33, 38; trans. Etzkorn, 225, 234, 253. ¹⁷⁰ Ibid. 1.3, 12–16, 33, Opera omnia 8:30, 33–5, 39–40; trans. Etzkorn, 225–6, 236–40, 256–8. ¹⁷¹ Ibid. 1.8, 1.21–9, 1.37, 1.42–6, Opera omnia 8:32, 36–9, 40–1, 42–4; trans. Etzkorn, 232–3, 246–54, 260, 263–8. ¹⁷² Ibid. 2.1; 3.14, Opera omnia 8:44, 56; trans. Etzkorn, 271, 311–12. ¹⁷³ Ibid. 4.1, Opera omnia 8:56–7: “Sed iam, o anima, ne diutius te protraham nec amplius te per exspectationem affligam . . . Erige rationem, dilata et expande affectionem . . . Gaude igitur et exsulta ac mercedem laboris tui considera.” Trans. Etzkorn, 313: “But now, o soul, lest I leave you too long in suspense and afflict you with unfulfilled hope . . . Lift up your powers of reasoning, open and expand your affections . . . rejoice and exult, and consider the reward for your labor.” The notion of a right time for making the exercise invokes a notion of kairos, the opportune time or ideal moment, which will be so important to Luther. The difference is that kairos is related here to the circumstances of the meditating individual—whether she is ready to make the next step in the exercise—whereas for Luther and Protestants kairos refers to that which is opportune for the individual but also and above all to the epoch in which all humankind has lived ever since Christ’s ministry spread the message of saving grace. See section 2 of Chapter 5, 212–20.

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contemplation which they also turn in each of four directions: at the world, sin, and the devil beneath them (infra se); at the celestial city round about them (iuxta se); at the glory of the resurrection body within them (intra se); at God, the summum bonum above them (supra se).¹⁷⁴ The directions are the same as the soul was told to follow at the beginning of the Soliloquium (iuxta se in the heavenly sequence equates to ad exteriora in the prologue); the order in which they are contemplated is not the same, however, nor are the objects contemplated by the citizens of heaven identical with the ones that the soul is instructed to consider in the equivalent direction of the exercises. These differences are deliberate and functional; they serve as a reminder that the perspective of the soul contemplating heaven while still in its mortal body is not the same as the perspective of those who actually dwell in the city of heaven. Yet the two points of view, the earthly and the heavenly, are permitted to merge for a time, before separating again at the end of the exercise. The soul, looking up, is told by the inner man to “see [vide] and investigate with a devout mind [devota mente pertracta] how the divine and celestial spirits, who have escaped the peril of this present life and its misery . . . sometimes turn the ray of their contemplation on the things beneath them [aliquando tamen radium suae contemplationis convertunt ad inferiora]” and rejoice at their liberation from the diabolical and worldly afflictions they see down below; the soul is further instructed to bring this perspective to mind whenever it encounters temptation or persecution in this life.¹⁷⁵ Thus, the soul not only contemplates others as they contemplate, looking up at the heavenly citizens who look down; it is encouraged to look with them, to obtain a foretaste of their bliss through a mental re-enactment of their downwarddirected contemplation. The mingling of perspectives continues in the next celestial direction, as the contemplating soul is told to feast its inner eyes (oculi mentales) on the heavenly delights round about (iuxta te).¹⁷⁶ It seems, however, that when it comes to looking within (intra se), the soul no longer sees directly what the citizens of heaven see, since it is merely instructed to consider (considerare) and reflect on (cogitare) the glory of the resurrection body.¹⁷⁷ The demerging of perspectives is clear and categorical in the last direction. Invited by the inner man to consider (considerare) and observe (advertere) the beatific vision and the joy of those who gaze into the mirror of eternity above them (supra se), the soul asks: “What will I see?” (Quid videbo?)—the future tense establishing beyond all doubt that it is not looking in the mirror now.¹⁷⁸

¹⁷⁴ Bonaventure, Soliloquium 4.6, 4.9–10, 4.20–3, Opera omnia 8:58, 59, 62–5; trans. Etzkorn, 317–18, 320–1, 331–6. ¹⁷⁵ Ibid. 4.5, 4.8, Opera omnia 8:58–9; trans. Etzkorn, 317, 319–20. ¹⁷⁶ Ibid. 4.9, Opera omnia 8:59; trans. Etzkorn, 320–1. On the description of heaven, see also Chapter 2, 94–6. ¹⁷⁷ Ibid. 4.21, 4.22, Opera omnia 8:63–4; trans. Etzkorn, 333–5. ¹⁷⁸ Ibid. 4.23, 4.25, Opera omnia 8:64–5; trans. Etzkorn, 335–6, 337–8.

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Through this skillfully controlled blending and separation of perspectives the goal of the exercise is facilitated. The contemplating soul is promised that if it regularly considers the joys of heaven it “will daily have a spiritual foretaste of eternal sweetness” (aeternam dulcedinem quotidie spiritualiter praelibando degustares).¹⁷⁹ For this foretaste to be at all possible, the soul must be allowed to see as the inhabitants of heaven see. On the other hand, the foretaste can never be the full taste, for the soul is not actually in heaven, but still on pilgrimage through this life; hence the inner man’s insistence on the differences between the terrestrial and the celestial regimes of gazing, and the demerging of perspectives at the end of the exercise. Nevertheless, the temporary mingling of perspectives brings about a permanent transformation of the soul and its attitude to its earthly habitation. Quoting Jerome, the inner man tells it: “As often as the useless yearning for this world pleases you and as often as you see something glorious about this world, immediately cross over to heaven in your thoughts and anticipate what you will be in the future [statim ad caelum mente transgredere, et esse incipe quod futura es].” He continues: “I truly believe, O soul, that if you consistently concentrate on celestial joys, you will consider this life of exile as a suburb of the heavenly kingdom [de hoc exsilio quoddam suburbium caelestis regnis construeres].”¹⁸⁰ Crossing over to heaven in its contemplation, the soul dwells just before—in the temporal as well as the spatial meaning of the preposition—its future abode in the celestial city. That is of course the situation of the traditional Benedictine monk who feared and desired and philosophized on the margin of this world and time. The difference is that Bonaventure equipped the simple soul with a comprehensive and methodical script of directions for getting there.

¹⁷⁹ Ibid. 4.4, Opera omnia 8:57; trans. Etzkorn, 316. ¹⁸⁰ Ibid., quoting Jerome, letter 22.41, Epistulae, ed. Hilberg, 1:210.

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2 Out of This World Seeing the Afterlife in the Somme le Roi

1. A voyage out Therefore, if you want to know what is good and what is evil, go out of yourself, go out of this world, learn to die, separate your soul from your body in thought. Send your heart into the other world—that is, into heaven, hell, and purgatory. There you will see what is good and what is evil. In hell you will see more suffering than anyone can describe, in purgatory more torments than anyone can endure, in paradise more joy than anyone can desire. Hell will teach you how God avenges mortal sins; purgatory will show you how God cleanses venial sins; in paradise you will see plainly how virtue and good works are handsomely rewarded. These three things contain all that is needed in order to know how to live well and die well. Donc se tu veuz savoir que est biens et que est maus, is hors de toi, is hors dou monde; apren a morir. Dessevre t’ame dou cors par pensee; enuoie ton cuer en l’autre siecle, c’est ou ciel, en enfer, en purgatoire; la verras tu que est biens, que est maus. En enfer, verras tu plus de doleurs c’on ne te porroit deviser; en purgatoire, plus de tormenz que on ne porroit endurer; en paradis, plus de joie que on ne porroit desierrer. Enfers t’enseignera comment Diex venge pechié mortel; purgatoire te moustrera comment Diex espurge pechié veniel; en paradis tu verras apertement comment vertuz et bone euvre est guerredonee hautement. En ces .III. choses a tout quanque il covient a bien savoir vivre et bien morir. These directions for a virtual journey into the regions of the afterlife are from the Somme le Roi, a handbook of Christian moral teaching compiled for King Philip III of France by his Dominican confessor Friar Laurent in 1279.¹ It is one of several pastoral compendia written in the French language on both sides of the ¹ Laurent, Somme 40.53–61, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 175–6. See their introduction, 13–19, for the author (also attested as Laurent d’Orléans and Laurent du Bois, though neither his birthplace nor his family name is certain) and the date of composition. Meditating Death in Medieval and Early Modern Devotional Writing: From Bonaventure to Luther. Mark Chinca, Oxford University Press (2020). © Mark Chinca. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198861980.001.0001

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English Channel in the thirteenth century that transmitted clerical doctrine to laypeople; what it has in common with contemporary works such as the Manuel des pechiez (ca. 1260) by William of Waddington and the Lumere as lais (ca. 1267), a vernacular version of Honorius Augustodunensis’ Elucidarium by Pierre d’Abernon, is that it actively engages its addressees’ curiosity about death and the afterlife so as to make them realize that the knowledge of the last things they acquire in this life only has a use and a purpose if they are saved in the next.² William brings this realization about through his homily-like explanation of the eleventh article of faith (“I believe in the resurrection of the body”), which relates the biblical parable of the separation of the sheep from the goats (Mt 25:31–46) with the intention of focusing readers’ minds on what they will find when their turn comes to rise from the grave: Christ sitting in judgment over them, inviting the righteous into heaven and banishing sinners to everlasting punishment in hell; Pierre educates his audience through an extensive pedagogical dialogue in which a pupil asks questions about the resurrection, judgment, purgatory, hell, and heaven, and a teacher leads him systematically through the answers, embellishing them on occasion with parables and examples.³ Laurent harnesses curiosity about the last things in a different way, not by sermonizing or catechizing his readers but by proposing a daily act of meditative “going out” which will allow them to experience everything they want or ought to know about the afterlife at first hand. The instructions for going out of oneself and out of this world form the conclusion to a chapter which bears the title “How to Learn to Die Well” (Comment on aprent a bien morir), and they are elaborated over two subsequent chapters, each one adding a further pedagogical task to the first. Under the next rubric, “How to Learn to Hate Sin” (Comment on aprent a haïr pechié), the reader is instructed: “So that you may learn to hate sin, forget your body once a day, go to hell while you are alive in order to avoid going there when you are dying”; the rest of the chapter explains how, by mentally picturing the everlasting torment of sinners in hell and the suffering of poor souls in purgatorial fire, the reader will conceive the fear of God that is the beginning of the good life.⁴ Then, in the chapter “How to Learn to Do Good” (Comment on aprent a bien fere), the author explains that “it is not yet enough to relinquish evil deeds if one does not also learn ² I owe this insight into the fundamentally eschatological orientation of thirteenth-century French pastoral literature to Waters, Translating “Clergie”, esp. chap. 2. She concentrates on writings in AngloFrench, though the thesis is evidently applicable to works written in French on the continent. A further important study of the transmission of clerical knowledge to laypeople in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, with a focus on French and English social elites and the illustrated manuscripts produced for them, is Kumler, Translating Truth. ³ William of Waddington, Manuel des pechiez, lines 792–856, ed. Furnivall, 424–5; Pierre d’Abernon, Lumere as lais, lines 11,687–13,938, ed. Hesketh, 2:134–98. For information about the two works and discussion of their treatment of the last things, see Waters, Translating “Clergie”, 45–60, 86–93. ⁴ Laurent, Somme 41.3–4, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 176: “pour ce que tu apreignes a haïr pechié, oblie ton cors une foiz le jor. Va en enfer a ton vivant, que tu n’i voises a ton mourant.”

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to do good ones and acquire the virtues without which no one can live well or rightly”; hence, the tour of the other world must be continued, so that the reader may experience the joys of paradise and become inebriated with love of God, which is declared to be an incomparably stronger motivator than fear to virtuous living.⁵ “Learn to die,” “Learn to hate sin,” “Learn to do good.” It is not hard to recognize in this sequence of instructions and the mental operations and affective dispositions associated with them yet another devotional regimen based on the Bible verse “Remember thy last end and thou shalt never sin.” What makes this one distinctive, however, is that a spiritual exercise in which the lineaments of Platonic meletē thanatou and Christian meditatio mortis are clearly discernible has become the instrument of a moral pedagogy expressly adapted to the needs and circumstances of laypeople.⁶ The three chapters introduce a major section of the Somme which is called the “Treatise on Virtues” and which teaches the reader to discriminate between different kinds of worldly and spiritual good in order to lay the foundation of an active life that will be “honorable and profitable and delightful”—a task that will be made considerably easier by a daily voyage out to see the consequences in the afterlife of not discriminating properly during this life.⁷ The intellection of ultimate truth and reality by a soul detached from the body, important still as a goal in its own right in Bonaventure’s programs of methodical contemplation, has here become a little ars moriendi—perhaps the very first example of the genre in any western European vernacular—offering a practical routine for forgetting the hurly-burly of worldly living once a day and

⁵ Ibid., 42.2, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 178: “Mes n’est pas assez lessier le maus se on n’aprent des biens a fere et se l’en n’aquiert les vertuz senz lesqueles nus bien ne a droit vit.” ⁶ On meletē thanatou and meditatio mortis, see Chapter 1, 38–43. Laurent states his policy of adaptation explicitly when explaining his decision to abbreviate the discussion of simony and other varieties of avarice peculiar to clerics: “cist livres est plus faiz pour les lais que pour les clers qui ont les livres” (Somme 36.154, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 142; this book is made for laypeople rather than for clerics, who possess books); “cist livres est plus fez pour les lais que por les clers, car il sevent les Escriptures” (ibid., 36.221, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 146; this book is made more for laypeople than for clerics, because the latter know the scriptures). It would be mistaken nonetheless to restrict the author’s purposes too narrowly to the terms of the famous decree Omnis utriusque sexus of the Fourth Lateran Council, which imposed the duty of annual confession and communion on all Christians, and categorize the Somme primarily or even exclusively as an aid to preparing laypeople for confession; see for example Brayer, “Contenu,” 2; Payen, “Pénitence,” 424; Rusconi, “Ordinate confiteri,” 311; Boyle, “Fourth Lateran Council,” 32, 35. For a view which emphasizes the multiplicity of functions (selfexamination, catechetical instruction, preparation for confession, private meditation, moral education) that could be fulfilled by the Somme and other works of the same genre, see Newhauser, Treatise, 65, 86–8, 141. ⁷ Laurent, Somme 49.85, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 199. Laurent’s treatise is made up of five parts: 1. The Ten Commandments; 2. The Articles of Faith; 3. Treatise on Vices; 4. Treatise on Virtues; 5. The Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit. The fourth part is entitled “Li traitiers des vertus” in early manuscripts of the Somme; in their edition, Brayer and Leurquin-Labie have somewhat confusingly chosen to call it “Éloge de la vertu,” reserving the designation “Traité des vertus” for the fifth part.

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concentrating the mind on “all that is needed in order to know how to live well and die well.”⁸ The innovation was not Laurent’s: the “Treatise on Virtues” and the ars moriendi chapters that introduce it were taken over by him from another, slightly earlier vernacular handbook of practical theology entitled the Miroir du Monde.⁹ But it was Laurent’s version that went on to achieve widespread and enduring success. Over ninety surviving manuscripts (compared to around fifteen for the Miroir) attest to its continuous copying from the end of the thirteenth to the late fifteenth century.¹⁰ During the same period, numerous translations into other Romance languages and also into English and Dutch gave it currency beyond French-speaking lands and readers.¹¹ The Somme also made the transition into print,¹² so that as late as the end of the sixteenth century its allegorical imagery was a palpable influence on the poetry of Spenser.¹³ The great diffusion of the Somme was not only geographical and linguistic, it was also social. Possibly Laurent intended his work for the religious and moral instruction of the king’s children, as well as to provide the royal household generally with improving reading;¹⁴ certainly the Somme retained its appeal down the centuries as a pedagogical and edifying handbook for the elite of lay society. Jean Gerson was still recommending it as suitable reading for a prince in a letter written in 1417 to Arnulf Charreton,

⁸ On the place of the Somme in the ars moriendi tradition, see O’Connor, Art of Dying Well, 17–18; Rudolf, Ars moriendi, 15–17. Both scholars remark that the chapters in question are not an ars moriendi in the strict sense, but an “art of living,” since their purpose is to encourage readers to lead a virtuous life rather than give advice on appropriate conduct at the hour of death; the distinction is however over-precise, and in manuscript and early print sources the generic label ars (or scientia) moriendi was applied indiscriminately to any kind of instruction for learning to die, irrespective of the time of life it was intended for. ⁹ The Miroir du Monde dates from the 1270s; the compilation as Laurent would have known it comprised: 1. Treatise on Virtues; 2. Treatise on Vices (the Seven Deadly Sins), and perhaps two further short addenda: 3. Precepts of Wisdom; 4. Treatise on Confession. Laurent took over the first two parts, but reversed their sequence and redacted their contents to produce a more compact and systematic presentation of the vices and virtues; he also surrounded these treatises with new material of his own. See Brayer, “Contenu,” 7–38, 433–52. ¹⁰ An overview of the transmission of Laurent’s Somme, along with a list of manuscripts, is provided by Brayer and Leurquin-Labie in the introduction to their edition, 23–7, 483–523. For the transmission of the Miroir, and also of mixed recensions of the Somme and Miroir, see Brayer, “Contenu,” 8, 433–7, 464–70. ¹¹ Brayer and Leurquin-Labie survey the various medieval translations in the introduction to their edition of Laurent’s Somme, 86–9. Since their bibliography was compiled, three more translations of the Somme (or of a mixed Somme-Miroir recension) have been become available in critical editions: The Mirroure of the Worlde, ed. Raymo and Whitaker; Speculum vitae, ed. Hanna; Two Middle English Translations, ed. Roux. ¹² Early prints in French are listed in Laurent, Somme, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 24–5; for editions in Dutch, see Des Coninx Summe, ed. Tinbergen, 204–8; in English GW M17250, ESTC S101034, S120603. ¹³ Tuve, Allegorical Imagery, 57–143. ¹⁴ He was tutor to the children of Philip IV; see Laurent, Somme, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 14–19.

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tutor to the Dauphin and future King Charles VII of France;¹⁵ royal and grand aristocratic patrons commissioned and owned illuminated manuscripts of the work.¹⁶ Yet Laurent’s version percolated down the social hierarchy too, reaching readers in the gentry and mercantile classes, and it crossed over from secular environments to the cloister, appealing to regular clergy, tertiaries, and other lay religious.¹⁷ The three introductory chapters of the “Treatise on Virtues” have no equivalent in the Latin source used by the anonymous Miroir author, the Summa de virtutibus by William Peraldus.¹⁸ Instead, the author drew on the Bible and the whole tradition of Christian spiritual and ascetic writing, from Augustine and Gregory the Great to Bernard of Clairvaux and Bonaventure, in order to create a spiritual exercise whose agenda was most probably set by the Benedictine Rule with its exhortations “to fear the day of judgment; to be in dread of hell; to desire eternal life with all the craving of your spirit; to keep death daily before your eyes.”¹⁹ The principal modification to the traditional schema of the last things (death, judgment, hell, paradise) was the replacement of judgment by purgatory. The effect of this theologically topical substitution—purgatory became a dogma of the western Church at the First and Second Councils of Lyons of 1245 and 1274— was to introduce greater depth and differentiation into the eschatological timeframe of the exercise. Although (as we shall see) the outermost temporal horizon of the reader’s meditation continues to be defined by the end times, when all the ¹⁵ Gerson, “De considerationibus quas debet habere princeps,” Œuvres complètes de Jean Gerson 2:212. ¹⁶ For examples, see Laurent, Somme, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 24, 26. Some of the illuminations are discussed below, 83–93. ¹⁷ Laurent, Somme, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 25–6. The variety of milieux in which translations of the Somme were made and read in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries may be illustrated from three examples. The earliest of several Middle English translations, the Ayenbite of Inwyt, is preserved in a single manuscript from the library of the Benedictine abbey of St. Augustine’s Canterbury (London, British Library, Arundel Ms. 57, dated 1340); the translator (or possibly he was just the copyist of the manuscript) Dan Michel was by that time a monk there (Dan Michel’s Ayenbite of Inwyt, ed. Morris and Gradon, 2:1–14). Jan van Rode, who completed the Middle Dutch translation of the first four parts of the Somme in 1408, described himself as a lay brother in the Carthusian monastery of Zeelhem in Brabant, saying that he had chosen to translate the work because “of all the books I have heard this seems to me as useful a book as I have ever read for a lay person [enen leken mensche] to read in, who desires to live in accordance with God’s commandments” (Des Coninx Summe, ed. Tinbergen, 219); the manuscripts and prints of Des Coninx Summe reflect a broader reading public, embracing nuns and canons as well as laypersons (ibid., 197–208). Another Middle English translation, of a mixed recension of the Somme and Miroir du Monde, was most likely made around 1450 for a patron (perhaps John Fastolf) among the East Anglian gentry; the unique manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ms. Bodley 283) belonged in the fifteenth century to the wealthy London draper Thomas Kippyng. See The Mirroure of the Worlde, ed. Raymo and Whitaker, 26; Scott, Caxton Master, 45–6. ¹⁸ On this treatise (ca. 1248) and its companion piece, the Summa de vitiis (ca. 1236), see Dondaine, “Guillaume Peyraut”; Newhauser, Treatise, 36, 127–30, 195–7. Critical editions of both the Summa de virtutibus (by Michiel Verweij) and the Summa de vitiis (by Richard G. Newhauser, Siegfried Wenzel, et al.) are in preparation; see https://www.narcis.nl/research/RecordID/OND1294348, and http://www. public.asu.edu/~rnewhaus/peraldus/ (accessed October 10, 2019). ¹⁹ Benedict, Regula, 4.44–7, ed. Hanslik, 32; Rule, trans. White, 18. See also Chapter 1, 20–1.

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dead will rise in their bodies and collectively face the last or universal judgment, there is a new foregrounding of what might be called the inner eschatological horizon of death and the particular judgment: the preliminary sentence passed by God on each individual soul as soon as it has departed the body, and which assigns it to heaven, hell, or purgatory for the interim before the definitive separation of the sheep from the goats at the last assize.²⁰ This focus on the time immediately after death could only reinforce the program of practical moral education envisaged by both the author of the Miroir and Laurent, for it brought divine reward and punishment very near indeed to the lifeworld of their readers.²¹ The spiritual exercise involves movement (“go out of yourself, go out of this world”) and sense perception (“you will see”), the results of which are cognitive (“to know what is good and what is evil . . . all that is needed in order to know how to live well and to die well”). Of course, the meditator does not move in actual space and does not see with the corporeal eyes; these actions are virtual, performed “in thought” (par pensee) and “in desire” (par desirrer).²² This chapter will examine, first of all, how the required movement and sense perception were initiated by the words of the text: by the grid of classifications it imposes on the different possibilities for going out, which encourages readers to think of the ²⁰ Both purgatory and the notion of a preliminary judgment which it implies had been elements of Christian belief since at least the second century. The now classic treatment of the former is Le Goff, Birth of Purgatory; for a summary of the controversy his book has provoked, see Bynum, Resurrection of the Body, 280–3. For the particular judgment, not defined doctrinally until 1336 (Benedict XII, Benedictus Deus), see DTC 8:1803–12. ²¹ Cf. Bernstein, “Heaven, Hell and Purgatory,” who identifies the increasing focus on the time in between the death of the individual and the general resurrection preceding the last judgment and second coming as one of the great developments in Christian ideas about the afterlife in the period 1100–1500. Purgatory also features in Pierre d’Abernon’s Lumere as lais (ca. 1267), which is contemporary with the Miroir and Somme, as well as in two slightly later Latin works that explicitly seek to harness the injunction of Sirach 7:40 to teaching on vices and virtues and precepts for leading a moral life: the De consideratione novissimorum, a set of homiletic discourses probably written by Durand of Champagne between 1307 and 1311; and the Speculum morale, a didactic handbook relating to virtuous actions, eschatology, and the seven deadly sins compiled between 1310 and 1320 by an anonymous author, who incorporated the text of the De consideratione wholesale into his treatment of the last things. None of these works however describes anything like a spiritual exercise or method for regularly meditating on the last things. Pierre d’Abernon recounts exempla from Gregory the Great’s Dialogues in order to prove the existence of purgatory: Lumere, lines 12,101–304, ed. Hesketh 2:146–52; cf. Gregory, Dialogi 4.36, 42, 57, ed. Moricca, 282–3, 297–300, 315–17 (exempla of Eumorfius and Stephanus Optio, Pascasius, and the priest of Centumcellis); for commentary on the passage, see Waters, Translating “Clergie”, 89–91. The Latin works, both of which came to be attributed to other authors by the fifteenth century (the De consideratione to Bonaventure, and the Speculum morale to Vincent of Beauvais) treat purgatory as a subtopic of death, an arrangement that does not occlude it so much as impart prominence and duration to the inner eschatological horizon, which extends from death to the general resurrection. On the De consideratione and the Speculum morale and their textual relations, see Mews and Zahora, “Remembering Last Things”; on the latter work, and its complicated relationship to the Speculum maius of Vincent of Beauvais, see also the website http://www. vincentiusbelvacensis.eu/index.html (accessed October 10, 2019). ²² Laurent, Somme 40.54, 42.5, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 175, 178. The operators par pensee and par desirrer seem to derive from Gregory the Great, who regularly used the adverbial phrases mente transire, per desiderium transire, per desiderium et intellectum cognoscere in analogous contexts, for example in the Homiliae in Hiezechihelem prophetam 1.3.11, 2.1.16, 2.2.13, ed. Adriaen, 39, 221, 233.

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boundary between this life and the next as a potentially traversable horizon; and also by its metaphors, which jolt readers out of the everyday world of their perceptions and allow them to picture the otherworld as a physical landscape through which they may move. Since manuscripts of the Somme sometimes accompanied the text of the exercise with an actual picture, the discussion will next consider the ways in which the illustrations could supplement the mental imagery generated by the textual metaphors, as well as reinforce and amplify the text’s rhetorical structures. Because the text claims that the reader who goes out of this world to see the regions of the afterlife will come back really knowing about them, the chapter then proceeds to explore the psychological theory and epistemological assumptions that frame the process of seeing and guarantee that the meditator has not merely imagined or hallucinated;²³ the theory in question is Augustine’s account of the distinctions between corporeal, spiritual, and intellectual seeing, which posits that the psychological faculties involved in visions of the afterlife are the same, minus the bodily senses and sometimes also the imagination, as the ones engaged in everyday routines of perceiving and gaining knowledge about the world. The effects that are claimed for the exercise do not end however with perception and cognition: the meditator who goes out of herself and the world once a day will also acquire a changed attitude to language, since it will become apparent to her that ordinary-language words such as “joy,” “honor,” “richness,” and “life” do not express the true reality of the goods of this world, which are more appropriately designated by their opposite names of “torment,” “indignity,” “dung,” and “death.” Accordingly, the chapter concludes with a discussion of the linguistic consequences of remembering the last end, placing them in the wider context of a general concern among thirteenth-century moral theologians about the need for propriety in language. Although the text of the exercise will be quoted in the version of Laurent, who took it over from the Miroir without changing it substantially,²⁴ I refer to it in the following as the ars moriendi of the “Treatise on Virtues” and to its anonymous author (the sole exception is when discussing features unique to the Somme); this usage is intended as a reminder that intention and authorship of the text are at one remove from the writer who happened to secure its dissemination on a European scale.

²³ The suspicion that visions cultivated through regulated meditative activity might not all be authentic, but products of a vivid imagination or—worse still—diabolically inspired illusion, was very real among theologians and churchmen of the later Middle Ages and gave rise to the practice known as the “discernment of spirits.” See Newman, “Medieval Visionary Culture,” esp. 33–41. ²⁴ His principal intervention was to reorganize the Miroir text under the three chapter rubrics. For a detailed textual comparison, see Brayer, “Contenu,” 9–12.

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2. Limit and horizon The ars moriendi is patterned with exemplary references to persons who offer either positive or negative illustrations of how to conduct oneself in the active as well as the contemplative life. The contrast serves to orientate the reader in the most basic attitudes and behaviors that should inform every moment of being in the world and going out of it. Three groups of “wise men” are differentiated according to their response to the injunction “Go out of yourself, go out of this world.” The “worldly wise” (li saige de cest siecle) commit the error of not wanting to go out at all. Ignorant of the hereafter, they fear and revile death as the end of the only existence they know.²⁵ A second group, comprising “wise Cato” (li saiges Chatons) and “great philosophers” (granz philosophes) of pagan antiquity, do want to go out, but make their exit in the wrong way. Despising this world and desiring immortality, the philosophers literally separate their souls from their bodies in the act of suicide.²⁶ Finally, “the holy men and the sages” (li saint homme et li saige) go out in the right way. Eagerly awaiting the death of the body, in the meantime they regularly separate soul from body “in thought and in desire” (par pensee et par desirrer) and send their hearts and minds into paradise.²⁷ This is of course the technique of meditation recommended to the reader, and the holy men negotiate its challenges in exemplary manner, successfully turning the experiences they undergo while they are out of themselves and out of this world into knowledge that directs their every action in the world: they love virtue and hate vice with such fervor, the author claims, that even if they could be certain of escaping God’s notice and punishment, they would still not commit a single sin.²⁸ The stance that the reader is required to adopt toward these three groups of wise men is nevertheless more nuanced and more complex than simple avoidance of the negative examples and imitation of the positive. On the one hand, the author insists on the incommensurateness of the different versions of wisdom. ²⁵ Laurent, Somme 40.50–2, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 175. The appellation sapientes huius mundi (or saeculi) was a topos among patristic and postpatristic writers; cf. Gregory the Great, Homiliae in Hiezechihelem prophetam 2.5.12, ed. Adriaen, 285; Gregory the Great, Moralia in Iob 18.46.74, 30.3.13, 34.13.24, ed. Adriaen, 939, 1499, 1749; Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones de diversis, 7.1–2, SBO 6 pt. 1:108–9; William of St. Thierry, Epistola 8, ed. Verdeyen, 229. It derives ultimately from Paul’s disparaging reference to the “wisdom of the world” (sapientia huius mundi) in 1 Cor 1:20. ²⁶ Laurent, Somme 40.30–2, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 174–5. “Wise Cato” must refer to Cato of Utica, one of the most celebrated Roman suicides, whose example was well known from Augustine, De civitate Dei 1.23, ed. Dombart and Kalb, 1:37–8; City of God, trans. Dyson, 35–6; he was reported by Plutarch to have read Plato’s Phaedo twice on the evening he killed himself (Lives, trans. Perrin, 8:400–1). The “granz philosophes” on the other hand are probably not intended as a reference to any one of the several schools of ancient philosophy that justified suicide, but refer generally to all the pagan philosophers who according to medieval anecdotal tradition committed suicide. See Murray, Curse on Self-Murder, 128–9, 140–2. ²⁷ Laurent, Somme 40.34–6, 41.5, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 175, 176. ²⁸ Ibid., 42.33–4, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 179.

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The worldly wise, who can see on this side only of a metaphorical stream which divides life from death, are to the holy men as blindness and folly are to insight and wisdom: “Worldly sense [li sens du monde] is folly and the clear-sighted [li cler voiant] see nothing . . . Those who are wise about this world [li saige de cest siecle], who see so clearly on this side of the stream, see nothing on the other side, and for that reason scripture calls them fools and blind.”²⁹ The philosophers, lacking grace and Christian faith, are to the same holy men as pagan error is to Christian truth. On the other hand, wisdom is assumed to be a scalar, rather than an absolute value. The ignorant are not utterly devoid of knowledge; they merely know less. Thus the philosophers rank between the holy men and the worldly wise, because although they are pagan, they know that this world is nothing in comparison with eternity; and even the “sens du monde” of the foolish and blind contains some positive knowledge, since the author concedes that the worldly wise do see clearly on one side at least of the stream.³⁰ In acquiring true wisdom, therefore, readers must take up something of the “wrong” viewpoint, even though it is ultimately to be discarded as limited. In other words, the cognitive work demanded by the “Treatise on Virtues” of its readers is that they should convert the conceptual limits of the less wise into their own horizons. In nature as in thought, a horizon describes a limit or boundary which, because it can be passed, is simultaneously a potentiality. The Greek participial phrase ho horizōn kuklos, meaning “the bounding circle,” was originally a term used by astronomers to designate the line where earth appears to meet sky and which delimits the circle of our vision; as the noun “horizon,” it was adopted by Neoplatonism, and became an established philosophical concept during the thirteenth century.³¹ Although its premodern application was generally in metaphysics or anthropology, where it designated the boundary between (for example)

²⁹ Ibid., 40.24, 40.50, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 174, 175, quoting Mt 23:17. The redesignation of worldly wisdom as folly when placed alongside the incommensurably greater wisdom of God is Pauline; cf. 1 Cor 1:18–20; 3:19. ³⁰ The model for the author’s differentiation of the three groups according to a principle of polarity on the one hand and one of scalarity on the other must be Bernard of Clairvaux’s sermon on the text of 1 Cor 1:31: “He that glorieth may glory in the Lord.” In the opening sections (Sermones de diversis 7.1–2, SBO 6 pt. 1:107–8; Monastic Sermons, trans. Griggs, 44–5), Bernard distinguishes between the worldly wise (sapientes huius mundi), the more enlightened philosophers (philosophi) among them, and the apostle Paul according to whether or not they acknowledge the true source of glory in God alone. “The philosophy of Paul,” which acknowledges that all glory belongs to the creator, “surpasses the philosophy of the wise of this world, which undoubtedly is foolishness before God” (superexcedat Pauli philosophia philosophiam sapientium mundi huius, quae nimirum stultitia est apud Deum; cf. 1 Cor 3:19). Although the philosophi do not achieve this level of insight, they at least know better than the worldly wise, because they “wisely pointed out” (prudenter adverterunt) that all human glory was vainglory; their position, though riddled with error, was nevertheless “nearer to truth” (propinquior veritati). With this last statement, Bernard stands in the tradition of Augustine, who declared that the Platonists came closest of all the schools of pagan philosophy to the truth of Christian religion: De civitate Dei 8, ed. Dombart and Kalb, 1:320–68; City of God, trans. Dyson, 312–58. ³¹ This and the following information is from the Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie 3:1187–206.

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temporality and eternity, or the corporeal and spiritual natures of a human being, sometimes medieval Latin horizon also had an epistemological component that presaged its usage in modern, especially hermeneutical and phenomenological, philosophy. According to William of Auvergne (d. 1249), for instance, the horizon is “that which bounds our vision” (finitor visus nostri), yet allows us to form a concept of what lies beyond, thereby simultaneously creating the essential context for understanding what lies within our field of vision.³² The “Treatise on Virtues” does not use the technical term “horizon.”³³ The concept is nonetheless implicit in the way in which the author identifies errors of the less wise, contrasts them with the superior understanding of those who are wiser, and associates gains in understanding with the act of going out or (another associated metaphor) frequenting the other side of the stream. The error of the worldly wise is that they rigidify death into an absolute limit. For them, death is the end, and this leads to their faulty estimate of it as well as of earthly life: For this death [i.e. earthly existence] they call life, and death, which for the good is the beginning of life, they call the end. And therefore they hate death, for they do not know what it is, nor have they frequented the far side of the stream. And no one knows anything who does not go out. Car ceste mort il apelent vie, et la mort, qui est es bons commencement de vie, il apelent la fin; et pour ce heent il tant la mort, car il ne sevent que ce est, ne dela le ruissel n’ont point conversé; et riens ne set qui hors ne va.³⁴

Death must therefore be understood as this life’s horizon, beyond which extends immortality; the horizon reveals earthly existence in its true proportion, as transience whose duration counts for “not one single moment in respect of the other life, which endures forever without end.”³⁵ The next group, the pagan philosophers “who so hated this life and so despised the world and so desired immortality,” do have the horizon that the worldly wise lack; the limit of their understanding lies with the body. To Cato’s exhortation “Let us part the spirit from the body often” (departons l’esperit du cors sovent) they respond by committing suicide; “but,” the author continues, “this brought them no gain, ³² William of Auvergne, De universo 1.2.4, Opera omnia 1:688. William gave his definition of the horizon in the traditional context of the boundary between time and eternity. The horizon aeternitatis et temporis is said to be perpetuitas; the latter’s quality of endlessness (indesinibilitas) permits us to form a concept of eternity, whereas its property of having a beginning (incoeptio) connects it with and highlights the finitude (finibilis duratio) of time. ³³ OF orizonte (later orison) is attested in the astronomical sense from the thirteenth century; cf. Godefroy, Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue française, s.v. “orizonte”; Wartburg, Französisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, s.v. “horizon”; Tobler-Lommatzsch, Altfranzösisches Wörterbuch, s.v. “orison.” ³⁴ Laurent, Somme 40.51–2, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 175. ³⁵ Ibid., 40.13–14, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 174: “pas un seul momenz au regart de l’autre vie qui touz jours dure senz fin.”

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because they had neither grace nor the faith of Jesus Christ [il n’avoient pas grace ne la foi Jhesucrist].”³⁶ The meaning of this condemnation, which seems to imply that self-murder might be a valid expression of contemptus mundi so long as the person committing suicide is Christian, becomes clear only through the ensuing contrast with the exemplary attitude of the holy men.³⁷ They too despise this world and long for death and immortality, but they do not take their own lives: But the holy men who love and fear God and have already undergone two of the three deaths, for they have died to sin and died to the world, are now awaiting the third death, that is, the parting of the soul from the body. Between them and paradise there is just a little wall, which they pass in thought and in desire; and although their bodies remain on this side, their hearts and minds are on the other side; their conversation is over there, as Saint Paul says. Mes li saint homme qui Dieu aiment et criemment, qui de .III. morz ont les .II. passees, car morz sont au pechié et morz au monde, or atendent la tierce mort, c’est la dessevree d’ame et de cors. Entre eus et paradis n’a fors une paroi petite que il trespassent par pensee et par desirrer, et se li cors est par deça, li cuers et li esperiz est par dela. La ont leur conversacion, si comme dit sainz Pous.³⁸

Pagan as well as Christian sources have shaped the contrast between the great philosophers and the holy men. Insofar as the difference turns on their respective interpretations of the call to separate soul from body, the model seems to be Macrobius’s discussion of suicide in his Commentary on the Dream of Scipio. Reconciling Socrates’ apparent prohibition on self-murder in the Phaedo with his statement, in the same dialogue, that philosophers should be eager for death, Macrobius explained that there was really no contradiction at all, because in each case Plato, through his mouthpiece Socrates, was talking about a different kind of death: the literal separation of soul from body in the first case, and a virtual ³⁶ Ibid., 40.30–3, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 174–5: “Or nous enseigne li saiges Chatons: ‘Aprenons, fet it, a morir; departons l’esperit du cors sovent.’ Ce firent pluseurs de ces granz philosophes, qui ceste vie tant haoient, et le monde tant mesprisoient et tant desirroient immortalité que il s’ocioient de leur gré; mes riens ne leur valut, car il n’avoient pas grace ne la foi Jhesucrist.” ³⁷ That this implication was felt by later readers is demonstrated by the early fifteenth-century Dutch translation of the Somme by Jan van Rode, who made a special point of underlining that the philosophers commit a damnable sin. The reader should on no account interpret the instruction to separate soul from body as anything other than a spiritual exercise. Des Coninx Summe, ed. Tinbergen, 320: “Daer om, wilstuut weten, wat goet ende wat quaet is, so sceide dijn siel dicke van dinen live. Dat en suldi emmer niet verstaen, dattu di selven doden sulles, als die philosophen som deden, als vooerseit is, want dat waer een verdoemlike onverghiflike sonde; mer sceide dine siel van dinen live, mit dyepen ghedachten.” (Therefore, if you wish to know what is good and what is evil, separate your soul frequently from your body. But on no account should you take this to mean that you should kill yourself, like the aforementioned philosophers, because that would be a damnable, unforgivable sin. Separate your soul from your body with deep thoughts instead.) ³⁸ Laurent, Somme 40.34–7, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 175, citing Phil 3:20: “But our conversation is in heaven.”

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separation (Macrobius was thinking of meletē thanatou) in the second, which comes about when the soul rejects corporeal desires and the allurements of the body.³⁹ The author of the “Treatise on Virtues” has aligned the pagan philosophers with the “literalist” position, and the Christian holy men with the “philosophic” approach, and has additionally subdivided the practice of virtual separation according to the Pauline metaphors of dying to sin and dying to the world.⁴⁰ The opposition between pagan and Christian is however also in respect of gain: the self-murdering philosophers of antiquity are said to have nothing to show for their suicide. For this, a model existed in Christian consolatory rhetoric of the late antique period. Ambrose, in an oration on his dead brother, confronted the pagan philosophers and their “practice of dying” (meditatio mortis) with Paul’s declaration “I die daily, I protest by your glory, brethren, which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord” (1 Cor 15:31): whereas the former merely attempted to die, the apostle died every day in actuality (meaning presumably that he lived under permanent threat of martyrdom); whereas the philosophers acted purely for their own gain, Paul risked death daily for the sake of others.⁴¹ The passage appears almost unchanged in a consolatory letter by Jerome, who added that the death of the philosophers took them from glory, whereas Paul died every day to glory.⁴² Governing the entire contrast is “grace and the faith of Jesus Christ,” which the philosophers lacked and the holy men by implication must possess. Grace, faith, and redemption through Christ are the great themes of Paul’s epistles, and these are the background against which the phrase requires to be understood. For Paul, the contents of faith centered on Christ’s incarnation, death, and resurrection: the “gift” offered by divine grace for the purpose of redeeming fallen humanity (Rom 5:15–16). All three events pertain to the body; belief in them brings about a transvaluation of human embodied existence. The person who believes that the son of God assumed a mortal body thereby dignifies her own body, and mortification of that body in imitation of Christ’s suffering becomes a way of revealing at least something of the divine in this world. In the New Testament, Paul and his followers are “always bearing about in our body the mortification of Jesus, [so] ³⁹ Macrobius, Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis 1.13.6–7, ed. Willis, 52: “homo enim moritur cum anima corpus relinquit solutum lege naturae: mori etiam dicitur cum anima adhuc in corpore constituta corporeas inlecebras philosophia docente contemnit, et cupiditatum dulces insidias reliquasque omnes exuitur passiones. . . . hanc ergo mortem dicit Plato sapientibus esse adpetendam, illam vero quam omnibus natura constituit cogi vel inferri vel accersivi vetat, docens expectandam esse naturam.” Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, trans. Stahl, 138–9: “The man dies when the soul leaves the body in accordance with the laws of nature; he is also said to die when the soul, still residing in his body, spurns all bodily allurements under the guidance of philosophy, and frees itself from the tempting devices of the lusts and all the other passions. . . . This is the death which Plato is saying wise men ought to seek; but the other death, which nature ordains for us all, he forbids us to force, or to cause, or to hasten, teaching us to wait upon nature.” Cf. Plato, Phaedo 61c, 62b, 67d, ed. Rowe, 27–8, 29, 36–7; trans. Gallop, 5, 6, 13–14; also Chapter 1, 41. Macrobius’s arguments against suicide, and their medieval reception, are discussed by Murray, Curse on Self-Murder, 147–51, 202–3, 222–4. ⁴⁰ Rom 6:10–11; Col 2:20. ⁴¹ Ambrose, De excessu fratris 2.35, ed. Faller, 268. ⁴² Jerome, letter 60.14.2, Epistulae, ed. Hilberg, 1:566.

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that the life also of Jesus may be made manifest in our bodies” (2 Cor 4:10). Moreover, the person who also believes that Christ rose bodily from the grave in order that all the dead shall rise (1 Cor 15:21–2), and that when the righteous put on the body of the resurrection they will see God face to face (1 Cor 13:12), is bound to understand re-embodiment as a precondition for the full reconciliation between humanity and divinity in heaven.⁴³ The same insistence on embodiment as an indispensable condition for atonement played a crucial part in Augustine’s celebrated polemic against Plato and his philosophical school in Book Thirteen of the City of God. The “Platonists” are said to differ from the Christians because they regard the death of the body not as punishment for sin, but as a liberation which allows the immortal soul to return to God and enjoy perfect bliss; for holding this view, Plato and his followers are charged with committing the error of considering the body in its mortal and corruptible aspect only, and of refusing to acknowledge that God is capable of making a body incorruptible and immortal if he so wishes. The Christians on the other hand, who do recognize that anything is possible for God, devote a special care to their bodies in this life, in accordance with Paul’s saying that “no man ever hated his own flesh, but nourisheth it and cherisheth it” (Eph 5:29); after death, the souls of the saints long to rejoin their bodies so that their reconciliation with God will be complete: not their natural bodies, which were sown in corruption, but their spiritual bodies, which will arise in incorruption (cf. 1 Cor 15:42, 44).⁴⁴ This difference of attitudes to the body—the one disdainful, the other careful—is precisely what distinguishes the pagan philosophers from the holy men in the “Treatise on Virtues.” Like Paul, the latter “desire to be dissolved and to be with Christ” while always accepting that “to abide still in the flesh is needful” for the accomplishment of God’s work on earth (Phil 1:23–4). Through their ascetic lifestyle (the metaphorical dying to sin and the world), they treat their bodies as vehicles for penance and piety in anticipation of the general resurrection and last judgment, so that when the day comes they will be worthy to possess the joy of paradise.⁴⁵ To the holy men, therefore, the body is not what the philosophers of

⁴³ Between the twelfth and early fourteenth centuries, there were several shifts in theological opinion over whether the souls of the blessed already enjoyed full vision of God before their bodies were restored to them in the general resurrection. Bernard of Clairvaux had insisted that it was not possible; between the 1240s and the 1330s, when Pope John XXII preached sermons that precipitated the notorious controversy over the beatific vision, the consensus was that the disembodied souls of the blessed could indeed see God, but that something was lacking from this vision that would be added only when the person was restored to psychosomatic wholeness. A dogmatic resolution to the controversy was imposed by Benedict XII in the constitution Benedictus Deus of 1336. The technical arguments, and the details of the debates of the 1330s, are explicated by Trottmann, Vision béatifique, and also Bynum, Resurrection of the Body, 164–6, 252–3, 266–9, 283–91. ⁴⁴ Augustine, De civitate Dei 13.16–23, ed. Dombart and Kalb, 1:574–92; City of God, trans. Dyson, 557–74. Paul’s famous words about the resurrection of the body from 1 Corinthians 15 are cited in 13.20 and again in 13.23. ⁴⁵ Laurent, Somme 42.35, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 179.

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antiquity mistook it for: the prison of the soul, keeping it from the full enjoyment of truth and immortality. On the contrary, the body is the soul’s horizon, beyond which lies the whole person who will be restored when soul is reunited with body at the end of days.⁴⁶

3. Passage and partition The holy men are already adept at going out of this world in their thoughts and desire; the reader of the “Treatise on Virtues” still has to learn. Accordingly, the ars moriendi proceeds from the common knowledge that the reader may safely be assumed to possess—a further illustration of the author’s willingness to concede a degree of truth to the wisdom of the world. Two universally accepted definitions of death are posited: “Death is a passage, everyone knows” (morz est un trespas, ce set chescuns); “Death is nothing but the separation of body and soul, everyone knows” (La mort n’est fors dessevremenz de cors et d’ame, ce set chescuns).⁴⁷ The two definitions perform different functions in the author’s exposition. The first is the premise of an argument for the proposition that “this life is nothing but death” (ceste vie n’est fors que mort). Accepting the truth of this claim will be the first stage of the reader’s lesson in dying well. The proof consists in pointing out that the two nouns in the statement share the same defining predicate. Death is a passage (trespas), and to die is to pass away (trespasser); likewise this life is a passage (trespassement, trespas), and our life passes by (trespasse). “Therefore,” the proof concludes, “to be living is nothing other than to be dying” (dont n’est vivre fors morir).⁴⁸ Then the author announces a change of pedagogical tactic: “I will ⁴⁶ Cf. Haas, Todesbilder, 24: “Die Fortdauer der Geistseele nach dem Tode kann also scholastisch nie Ersatz für die Auferstehung sein, sondern umgekehrt ist die Auferstehung die Bedingung für das Überdauern der Geistseele.” (In scholasticism, the continuation of the immaterial soul after death can never be a substitute for the resurrection; on the contrary: the resurrection is the condition for the survival of the immaterial soul.) The “Treatise on Virtues” was not written for an audience of academic theologians. Nevertheless, the author’s awareness of the body as that which reveals the soul to be less than the whole person may have been sharpened by scholastic controversies of the 1270s, when conservative theologians in Paris and Oxford challenged Aquinas’ doctrine of the unicity of form. These reactions to the doctrine, which states that the soul alone makes the body into the body of a particular person, as its unique form, have been described as “materialist” because they insist on a bodily basis of personhood as well, and also because they tend to endow even the separated soul with physicality. See Bynum, Resurrection of the Body, 271–8; Greshake and Kremer, Resurrectio mortuorum, 237–9. ⁴⁷ Laurent, Somme 40.10, 40.29, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 173, 174. ⁴⁸ Ibid., 40.10–21, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 173–4. The author claims to have proven the identity of life and death (life is nothing but death, living is nothing but dying), in spite of the fact that his logic demonstrates their equivalence (life and death, living and dying, share the same predicate “being a passage”). Moreover, the argument—which would have been ridiculed as a sophism by any contemporary reader trained in dialectic—merely proves something about our ordinary use of language, namely that nouns and verbs from the trespas family of words may be predicated of life and death alike. Augustine, who also posed the question whether the life of mortals was more appropriately called death, and whose discussion of the semantic slipperiness of the words “death,” “dying,” and

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teach you this lesson in yet another way, so that you may know how to die well and live well; listen and take heed.”⁴⁹ This second phase of instruction begins with the definition of death as separation; this time, however, the definition does not form the premise of an argument, but is the object of a twofold illustration. On the one hand, the references to the pagan philosophers, the holy men, and the worldly wise, which immediately follow the second definition, provide an exemplary illustration of the various ways, right and wrong, in which the soul may be parted from the body. On the other hand, there is a process of what might be called “tropological” (in the rhetorical sense of “pertaining to a trope”) illustration: the definition of death as separation is combined with the previous definition of death as passage, and re-expressed in a small number of metaphors that make the abstract concepts of passage and partition concrete and palpable. These metaphors are interspersed in the descriptions of the different kinds of wise men; they all converge semantically in the notion of a threshold: a partition that may be passed. Death is, first, the “little wall” (paroi petite) through which the holy men pass when they send their hearts and minds into paradise; then it is the “stream” (ruisseaus) whose far bank the worldly wise do not visit in their benightedness; finally, it is the “gate and entrance to all good things” (porte et entree de touz biens) for the faithful (preudeshommes).⁵⁰ Metaphorical utterances have a focus and a frame: they contain at least one word (the focus) which, if interpreted literally, would be odd or absurd, framed by other words which make acceptable sense in their literal meaning (to quote a classic example, the verb “plowed” is the focus in the sentence “The chairman plowed through the discussion”).⁵¹ Because however there are also metaphorical utterances that are all focus and no verbal frame (for example, Benjamin Disraeli’s words on becoming British Prime Minister: “I have climbed to the top of the greasy pole”), the notion of the frame has to be extended to include factors outside “dead” (mors, moriens, mortuus) evidently provided the author of the “Treatise on Virtues” with his principal arguments, was far more careful not to confuse logic with linguistic usage: De civitate Dei 13.9–11, ed. Dombart and Kalb, 1:565–71; City of God, trans. Dyson, 549–54. ⁴⁹ Laurent, Somme 40.28, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 174: “Encore en autre maniere t’aprendrai je ceste clergie que tu saiches bien mourir et bien vivre; or escoute et entent.” The Miroir reads “en une autre maniere milleur” (in another, better way). ⁵⁰ Laurent, Somme 40.35–52, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 175. All three metaphors owe at least something to Bernard of Clairvaux. The gate of life or glory (porta vitae, vitae ianua, porta gloriae) is a recurrent metaphor of his for the death of a saint; cf. Vita Sancti Malachiae 31.75, SBO 3:378; Sermo in transitu Sancti Malachiae 4, SBO 5:420; Sermo de Sancto Malachia 8, SBO 6 pt. 1:55; Sermones in annuntiatione dominica, 1.12, SBO 5:27. The wall may be derived from his commentary on Sg 2:9: “My beloved standeth behind our wall.” Bernard equates the wall (paries) with death, which the apostle Paul did not fear because he was separated by one wall only from the embrace of his beloved; the sinner, however, is afraid to pass over to the other side of the wall, because he regards it as an absolute limit (Sermones super Cantica Canticorum, 56.1–5, SBO 2:114–17). The “Treatise on Virtues” has made the worldly wise unwilling to cross a stream, perhaps influenced by 1 Kgs 2:37: “For on what day soever thou shalt go out, and shalt pass over the brook Cedron, know that thou shalt be put to death.” ⁵¹ Both the definition and the example are from Black, “Metaphor,” 27–8.

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of the sentence, such as the circumstances of the utterance or the audience’s beliefs about the speaker’s intentions, which indicate that the words are not to be taken at their literal assertion.⁵² The effect of the framing, however defined, nevertheless remains the same. It points up the dissonance in the metaphorical focus between its evidently inappropriate literal meaning and the serious intentions of the speaker, who presumably wishes to bring some or other relevant and noteworthy point to our attention. At the same time, the framing prompts us to eliminate the dissonance by seeking out an interpretation that will make sense in the overall context of the utterance.⁵³ There are many strategies for interpreting metaphor, though what they almost always have in common is that they involve replacing the metaphorical focus with another set of words which restate what we think the speaker really meant to say in plain paraphrase (“The chairperson directed the discussion methodically, permitting no digressions”; “I have overcome considerable difficulties to achieve the highest political office”).⁵⁴ In the case of the metaphors in the “Treatise on Virtues,” the interpretive challenge is not to find paraphrases—the text already supplies these in the form of the commonknowledge definitions of death. Rather, the challenge for the reader is to switch between different worlds: between the world of everyday experience, according to which it would be absurd to want to assert that death is literally a wall, a gate, or a stream, and an imaginary world, where death may be any and all of these things in actual fact. The switch is made as soon as the reader begins to visualize the metaphors in the mind’s eye. This process, which consists in mentally entertaining the possible world in which the metaphorical predicates of death are true in their literal assertion, helps the reader to imitate the holy men, and travel “in thought and in desire” into the next life. By picturing an imaginary space with a wall, gate, or stream (or all three ⁵² The example is from Searle, “Metaphor,” 105; he points out that the whole of the sentence may be taken literally and still make sense. In this example, the frame that highlights the words as metaphorical is constituted by pragmatic factors such as the reference of the deictic pronoun “I” and the context of the utterance: the audience know that the speaker is Benjamin Disraeli, that he has realized a political ambition that one might have thought beyond the reach of a Jew in nineteenth-century Britain, and that he is therefore unlikely to be talking literally about a recent display of acrobatic skill. Black, “Metaphor,” 29, also acknowledges the role played by contextual circumstances in recognizing metaphor, though he does not expand his explicit definition of the frame to include them. ⁵³ The assumption of this dissonance is common to the different accounts of metaphor that have been proposed by philosophy of language and speech-act theory. Cf. Davidson, “What Metaphors Mean” (metaphor involves a disjunction between the literal meaning of the words and their use, which consists in bringing something other than the metaphor’s literal truth to the listener’s attention); Searle, “Metaphor” (metaphor is one of a number of speech acts involving a divergence between “sentence meaning,” what the words mean, and “utterance meaning,” what the speaker means to say); Grice, “Logic and Conversation” (the “timeless utterance meaning,” the usual or lexical meaning of the words, is not the same as the “utterance occasion meaning,” the meaning of the words on a particular occasion of use). ⁵⁴ For an inventory of some of the more common strategies, see Searle, “Metaphor,” 103–12; also Martinich, “Theory for Metaphor,” 52–3. Even in the special case of poetry, the interpretive principle of verbal substitution holds, since we recognize poetic metaphor by its very unparaphrasability; see Harries, “Metaphor and Transcendence” and the companion piece “The Many Uses of Metaphor.”

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combined—the text gives no specific directions), and then imagining the soul’s passage across it, the reader may put into effect the central imperatives of the spiritual exercise “Go out of yourself,” “Go out of this world,” “Separate your soul from the body in thought,” “Send your heart into the other world.”⁵⁵ Once the borderland of death has been laid out in the reader’s meditation, it may be populated with further figments of the visual imagination inspired by the rhetoric of the text. In the sentence immediately before the gate (porte), the death of the holy men is personified as “Damsel Carry-Joy” (dameisele porte joie), “who crowns all the saints and sets them in glory;”⁵⁶ the reader may picture the damsel as an actual figure in a landscape, who stands at the gate with which her name is partly homonymous, welcoming the saints into paradise. Alternatively or additionally, the reader may visualize a second personification, introduced several sentences before the first mention of the holy men. Amplifying the proposition that this life is nothing but death, the author admonishes the reader directly: “For when you began to live, immediately you began to die, and death has conquered and holds all the elapsed time and years of your age.”⁵⁷ This personification is an example of what is sometimes called “animate metaphor”: an inanimate noun brought to life through combination with a verb whose literal meaning implies a living subject (for example, “the wind howled”); the device, which requires the animating verb to be construed as a metaphorical predication, is actually a kind of pseudo-personification, since the animated noun is not an autonomous character in a plot, but a rhetorical figure confined to the author’s discourse.⁵⁸ The personification of death as conqueror may however assume the status of an active character in the reader’s meditation, if the figure is pictured as an aggressive invader seizing all the territory on the near side of a stream. Such a visualization would certainly make pictorial sense of the author’s logically puzzling assertion that “death is the stream separating death and life,” in other words, death is ⁵⁵ Locational schemes for organizing and directing the flow of thought, such as a building with its various rooms and furnishings and the paths traced through it, were integral to monastic intellectual and ascetic culture. These schemes were composed in the mind from images either stored in memory, or suggested by the figurative language of the text being read; they could also find material support and inspiration in the built environment around the meditator. See Carruthers, Craft, 72–84, 92–4, 221–76. ⁵⁶ Laurent, Somme 40.44–5, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 175: “car c’est dameisele porte joie que la mort, qui touz les sainz couronne et met en gloire. Morz est es preudeshommes fins de touz maus et porte et entree de touz biens.” ⁵⁷ Ibid., 40.22, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 174: “car quant tu commenças a vivre, tu commenças tantost a morir; et tout ton tens et tout ton aage qui passez est, la mort a conquis et tient.” The apophthegm nascentes morimur is traditional, but the formulation “quant tu commenças a vivre, tu commenças tantost a morir” is an exact translation of Lotario dei Segni, De miseria condicionis humanae 1.22, ed. Lewis, 131: “Morimur ergo semper dum vivimus, et tunc tantum desinimus mori cum desinimus vivere.” (We are dying all the while we are alive, and when we start to live we start to die no less.) The notion that life on earth is a fixed quantity which steadily passes over into death’s possession is Senecan; the closest parallel is Epistles 1.2, trans. Gummere, 1:2–3: “Quicquid aetatis retro est, mors tenet” (Whatever years lie behind us are in death’s hands); cf. ibid., 24.20, trans. Gummere, 1:176–7. ⁵⁸ Bloomfield, “Personification Allegory,” 163–4.

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simultaneously the boundary and one of the spaces it bounds.⁵⁹ The personification of death as an invading conqueror who has taken possession of all the years of the reader’s life implies that the total lifespan of every human being is territory, which must be ceded inch by inch to death; disabusing the reader of any illusion that her life is her own, the author reasons: “You say you have an age of sixty years; it is not true, death has them and will never give them back.”⁶⁰ The reader’s past life is already the possession of death; the years that remain will be death’s; this remainder is the territory on the near side of the stream, ceaselessly and ineluctably diminishing until there is nothing to see but the line that once bounded it.⁶¹

4. Words and pictures Some readers of the ars moriendi in the version of the Somme le Roi would have had an actual picture to accompany their meditations. From a very early stage, perhaps even from the outset, Laurent’s compendium was illustrated by a cycle of fifteen illuminations, whose contents and layout are described in instructions for the artist which are found in manuscripts of the Somme from the 1290s onward.⁶² The fourth illumination of the series was designed to go at the start of the “Treatise on Virtues,” so that it faced the “Learn to Die” chapter;⁶³ fourteen of the surviving French manuscripts of the Somme (or of a mixed recension of the Somme and the Miroir du Monde) contain an illumination which conforms to the relevant instruction:⁶⁴ ⁵⁹ Laurent, Somme 40.49, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 175: “Morz est li ruisseaus qui depart mort et vie.” The formulation is a metaphorical encodement of the conceptual and terminological problem delineated by Augustine in De civitate Dei 13.9–11, ed. Dombart and Kalb, 1:565–71; City of God, trans. Dyson, 549–54: on the one hand “death” denotes the separation of body and soul, on the other it refers to the time during which the soul remains separated from its as yet unresurrected body. ⁶⁰ Laurent, Somme 40.23, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 174: “Tu diz que tu as .LX. anz; n’est pas voir: la mort les a ne jamés nes te rendra.” ⁶¹ The inspiration for the image is once again Augustine, De civitate Dei 13.10, ed. Dombart and Kalb, 1:567: “quidquid temporis vivitur, de spatio vivendi demitur, et cotidie fit minus minusque quod restat, ut omnino nihil sit aliud tempus vitae huius, quam cursus ad mortem.” City of God, trans. Dyson, 550: “Whatever time we live is subtracted from the whole span of our life, and what remains is becoming smaller and smaller each day.” ⁶² On the illustrations of the Somme and the instructions to the artist, see Millar, Illuminated Manuscript, 12–20; Kosmer, “Style and Iconography,” 1:20–2; Rouse and Rouse, Illiterati et uxorati, 1:145–71; Kumler, Translating Truth, 164–85; Cosnet, “La transmission”; Laurent, Somme, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 36–45. The consensus is that the pictures were probably devised at the same time as the text was being composed and hence reflect Laurent’s own intentions; Rouse and Rouse however argue that the picture cycle, though still early, dates from the reign of Philip IV, who succeeded to the throne in 1285 and may have wished to put his own personal stamp on a text commissioned by his father (Illiterati et uxorati, 1:146–8). ⁶³ The original format was a full-page illumination, with the text on the facing page; from around 1320 the image shared the page with text, sometimes taking up a single column’s width, sometimes the width of the whole page. See Rouse and Rouse, Illiterati et uxorati, 1:168–71. ⁶⁴ Picture IV is missing from three further manuscripts which originally had the complete cycle of illuminations. See the table in Laurent, Somme, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 35, and Kosmer’s

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  Here ends the “Treatise on Vices.” Here there is to be a picture. Firstly, Our Lord seated in judgment, and an inverted sword in his mouth, and a man and a woman kneeling, their hands joined, one on either side; and behind each one there is to be an angel standing, one holding a lance, the other a crown of thorns. And below these images there are to be four angels trumpeting, and as many graves as can be depicted, with the dead rising from them. And at the bottom there is to be hell’s cauldron on the fire, and souls in it; to the right an angel leading those who are of Our Lord, to the left two devils, one lifting the souls on his shoulder and throwing them into the cauldron, the other holding them tight on a chain.⁶⁵

The instruction plainly envisages an illustration based on the established iconography for the last judgment, which is derived from descriptions of the general resurrection and universal judgment in the Bible, in particular the Gospel of Matthew and the Book of Revelation.⁶⁶ The iconographic tradition is determinative; the resulting manuscript illuminations cannot therefore be interpreted as attempts at realizing in paint exactly what the accompanying text was seeking to make its readers see in the mind’s eye. There is no provision in the scheme for purgatory, no depiction of the joys of heaven, and the visual potential of the textual metaphors and personifications of death is completely ignored. The sole accommodation of the iconography to the text it accompanies is the stipulation that the artist should depict condemned and saved souls; this makes it possible to read the scenes at the bottom of the picture as the implementation of the sentences handed out to individual souls in the particular judgment. In some manuscripts of the Somme le Roi, the illuminator has gone beyond the instruction and added details corresponding to something in the text. The illustration in one of the oldest surviving manuscripts (Paris, Bibliothèque catalogue (“Style and Iconography,” vol. 2), which also includes one English and one Italian manuscript. ⁶⁵ Version of Harvard University, Houghton Library, ms. fr. 123, fol. 53, transcribed by Kosmer, “Style and Iconography,” 1:307: “Cy fenis le tretiez des vices. Cy doit avoir ymagez. Premierement nostre seigneur en seant a forme de jugement & une espee en sa bouche entreverse & ung homme & une femme a genoux jointes mains lung dune part lautre de lautre et derrierz chascung doit avoir ung angez en estant lung tient une lance lautre une coronne despines & de soz ces ymages doit avoir iiij anges cornans & de sepultures tant come en puet fere dont les mors rescuscitent et apres par desoz doit estre enfer la chaudiere sus le feu & les armes dedans & devers destre doiz avoir angez qui enmaynne ceulx de la part nostre seigneur et devers senestre .ii. deables lung qui pent les armes a son col & les giete en la chaudiere lautre qui les tient en une chaynne estrains.” ⁶⁶ Cf. especially Mt 24:31 (angels with trumpets herald Christ’s coming to judgment; also Rv 8:2); Mt 25:31–3 (Christ, sitting on his throne in judgment, separates the sheep from the goats; the former are placed on his right hand, the latter on his left; the judge’s throne is also mentioned in Ps 9:8, Rv 8:2 and 20:11); Rv 19:15 (the sword extending from the mouth of the judge; also Is 49:2); Jn 5:28–29, Rv 20:12, 15 (the general resurrection; the damned cast into the lake of fire). Angels bearing instruments of the passion, such as the lance and the crown of thorns, and the Virgin and Saint John the Baptist as intercessors are further standard elements of last judgment iconography; see LCI 4:513–23.

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Mazarine Ms. 870, fol. 44v) shows the souls of the elect being ushered (by Saint Peter rather than an angel) toward the gabled portal of heaven’s gate (Fig. 2.1);⁶⁷ the same is true of a late fifteenth-century manuscript of a Middle English translation of a mixed Somme-Miroir recension (Oxford, Bodleian Library Ms. Bodley 283, fol. 87v; Fig. 2.2);⁶⁸ in a third example (Cambridge, St. John’s College Ms. B 9, fol. 185v), the gate is not shown, but suggested metonymically by the large key to its door that Saint Peter flourishes (Fig. 2.3).⁶⁹ (These scenes are placed at the bottom left of the picture, so that the elect are on Christ’s right hand, as it says in Matthew 25:33; the artists interpreted the instructions “to the right” and “to the left” from his point of view, not the viewer’s.) The elect may also be shown wearing crowns, echoing the reference in the text to the crowning of the saints by Damsel Carry-Joy (Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana Ms. H 106 sup, fol. 23v).⁷⁰ Heaven’s gate and the crown of saints are biblical motifs, and for that reason are common in representations of the last judgment in painting and sculpture;⁷¹ it is therefore impossible to tell whether their inclusion in pictures illustrating the Somme has been directly inspired by Laurent’s text, or by iconographic tradition, or by the artists’ own knowledge of the Bible. Correspondence between single motifs in the picture and the text was not however the only or even the principal way in which the illustration could support a meditation set in train by reading the words. The iconography supplements the ars moriendi by thematizing the traditional last thing that was left out of the spiritual exercise, for although the text certainly mentions God’s judgment of sinners, only death, hell, purgatory, and heaven are made the explicit focus of meditation.⁷² Moreover, the hybrid nature of the iconography, combining references to the particular judgment with the general theme of the last judgment, corresponds to and reinforces the textual play of eschatological horizons, between the “inner” eschatological horizon constituted by death and the immediately post mortem destination of the soul on the one hand, and the “outer” horizon of the ⁶⁷ Henry Martin, “Somme le Roi”; Rouse and Rouse, Illiterati et uxorati, 1:148–54; Somme le Roi, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 66–7. The manuscript is dated 1295. ⁶⁸ Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts, 2:352–5, no. 136. Scott believes the manuscript was most probably made between 1470 and 1480. ⁶⁹ James, Catalogue, 40–4, no. 31, early fourteenth century; Rouse and Rouse, Illiterati et uxorati, 1:168–9, second quarter of the fourteenth century. ⁷⁰ The illumination is described by Kosmer, “Style and Iconography,” 2:34. The manuscript was made between 1310 and 1342; see Rouse and Rouse, Illiterati et uxorati, 1:163–4. ⁷¹ See Heinz-Mohr, Lexikon der Symbole, s.v. corona; Réau, Iconographie 2:743. Cf. Gn 28:17; 2 Tm 4:8; Jas 1:12; Rv 2:10, 21:21, 22:14. ⁷² The last judgment is mentioned in Laurent, Somme 41.22–6, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 177: “ainsint vivent comme s’il deussent chescun jour venir au Jugement devant Dieu . . . il metent painne d’eus laver et de relaver et amender et de eus ici jugier, que il atendent seurement le darrain Jugement; car qui ci se jugera veraiement, il n’avra guarde d’estre dampnez au jour de Jugement.” (Thus [the virtuous and devout] live as if they had to face God’s judgment every day . . . they are at pains to wash themselves clean of sin, over and over, and to make amends, and to sit in judgment upon themselves here, so that they may await the last judgment with certainty; for whoever passes judgment upon himself here truly will have no care of being damned on Doomsday.)

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Fig. 2.1 Last Judgment. Laurent d’Orléans, La Somme le Roi. Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine, Ms. 870 (dated 1295), fol. 44v. © Bibliothèque Mazarine.

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Fig. 2.2 Last Judgment. Middle English translation of a mixed Somme-Miroir recension. The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, Ms. Bodl. 283 (late fifteenth century), fol. 87v.

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Fig. 2.3 Last Judgment. Laurent d’Orléans, La Somme le Roi. St. John’s College, Cambridge, Ms. B 9 (second quarter of the fourteenth century), fol. 185v. By permission of the Master and Fellows of St. John’s College, Cambridge.

resurrection of the body and universal judgment on the other.⁷³ Finally, the structure and layout of the picture invite the viewer to convert limits into horizons in a process analogous to the one envisaged by the text. The usual practice of the ⁷³ Individual illuminations sometimes go very far in the direction of emphasizing the outer horizon, by incorporating elements of Apocalypse imagery, e.g. Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Ms. Barb. Lat. 3984, fol. 29. This late fourteenth-century manuscript of an Italian translation of the Somme shows Christ in a mandorla, below him a column with the Lamb of the Apocalyse on its top; see Kosmer, “Style and Iconography,” 2:82; Citton, “Immagine e testo.” On Apocalypse imagery, see Klein, “Apocalypse”; on the leaching of last judgment and Apocalypse iconographies into one another, see Schiller, Apokalypse, 2:166–70.

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Fig. 2.4 Last Judgment. Laurent d’Orléans, La Somme le Roi. Brussels, KBR, Ms. 9550 (ca. 1400), fol. 21v. © KBR—Manuscripts—9550.

illuminators was to place the different levels of prescribed imagery in three registers separated by lines and borders; in order to grasp the relation of the component parts of the picture to the whole, the viewer’s eye must not stop at the enclosing borders, but move across them. An especially skillful execution of the three-tier layout which exploits its horizonal potential to the full is found in the last judgment illumination of a late fourteenth- or early fifteenth-century manuscript of the Somme (Brussels, KBR, Ms. 9550, fol. 21v; Fig. 2.4).⁷⁴ The top and bottom registers, depicting Christ’s judgment and the fate of souls respectively, arrange their motifs from left to right on a single plane without depth or perspective; the sole exception is hell’s cauldron, in the center of the lower register, which the viewer looks into as if from above. The middle register stands out from the two others because it locates the resurrection of the dead in a three-dimensional space, indicated on the one hand by the ground, covered with open graves on which the viewer looks down, and on the other by the receding cloud-trails in the sky above, from which trumpet-blowing angels emerge. When the viewer’s eye roams across the top and bottom borders of this register, it perceives the sky as the canopy beneath

⁷⁴ Gheyn, Catalogue, 3:403–4, no. 2294; Gaspar and Lyna, Les principaux manuscrits à peintures, 1:395, no. 165.

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the celestial seat of judgment, and the ground as the topsoil of the subterranean realm where the judge’s sentences are carried out. The dead who rise from their graves are depicted stretching their clasped hands up to the sky, suggesting an upward trajectory which extends through the clouds and on into heaven; the graves however appear as holes in the ground, through which the resurrected dead may yet fall down into the gaping cauldron beneath. The artist’s use of perspective thus invites the viewer to trace out the lines of mediation between the different cosmic zones; the effect is to locate earthly existence in the horizon of the grave, which is seen to be not the end, but the threshold of everlasting damnation or salvation. The perspectival configuration also encourages the viewer to perceive a horizonal relation between body and soul. The dead who climb out of their graves are represented quite emphatically as bodies—their physicality suggested by the hair (its line in one case clearly receding) on their heads. Yet some of these same bodies might conceivably belong to the souls in hell portrayed in the register below, which as well as occupying a separate cosmic space also conflates two different eschatological time zones: the apocalyptic end time of the general resurrection and universal judgment to which the two upper registers belong (Christ the judge is seated on the rainbow throne of Revelation 4:8), and also (because the souls of the downright wicked are already sent to hell after the particular judgment) the interim between death and resurrection, when the soul is on its own. Passing from one zone of the illumination to the next, and making the connections, the viewer perceives the resurrected body as the disembodied soul’s horizon, as that which will rejoin and complete it, for eternal glory or everlasting torment, when the interim is over. Most of the manuscripts of the Somme le Roi that have a picture at the start of the “Treatise on Virtues” follow the artist’s instructions more or less to the letter.⁷⁵ A small number of them abandon the judgment theme completely. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France ms. fr. 409 shows a monk instructing a man (fol. 63r); another manuscript of the Bibliothèque Nationale, fr. 1134 depicts two men looking down on the naked corpse of a woman (fol. 149v).⁷⁶ Two further nonstandard iconographies are of interest because they pick up on the personification of death in the text as a conqueror. An early fourteenth-century manuscript

⁷⁵ Sometimes the contents of the picture are compressed into just two registers (Brussels, KBR Ms. 11041, fol. 36v; Hanover, Niedersächsische Landesbibliothek Ms. I 82, fol. 47; Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana Ms. H 106 sup, fol. 23v; Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France ms. fr. 14939, fol. 74v), or the images of either the resurrection or the saved and damned souls are omitted entirely (London, British Library, Royal Ms. 19 C II, fol. 26v; Oxford, Bodleian Library Ms. Bodley 283, fol. 87v; Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France ms. fr. 1895, fol. 41; Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève Ms. 2898, fol. 34v). Information from Kosmer, “Style and Iconography,” 2:7, 21, 30–1, 34, 41–2, 63, 66–7, 69. ⁷⁶ Kosmer, “Style and Iconography,” 2:50–2, 60–2. BnF fr. 409 is from the end of the fourteenth century, fr. 1134 from the fifteenth century.

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Fig. 2.5 Death defeating a king. Laurent d’Orléans, La Somme le Roi. St. John’s College, Cambridge, Ms. S 30 (early fourteenth century), fol. 64r. By permission of the Master and Fellows of St. John’s College, Cambridge.

now in Cambridge, St. John’s College Ms. S 30, shows death as a decomposed corpse, dressed in a shroud and piercing a king with a spear (fol. 64r; Fig. 2.5).⁷⁷ A predatory death is also depicted in the two editions of the Book Ryal, William Caxton’s English translation of the Somme, that were printed in 1507 by Wynkyn de Worde.⁷⁸ The woodcut accompanying the second of the three ars moriendi chapters shows death as a powerful, semi-skeletal warrior mounted on a steed; under his right arm he carries a coffin, spade, and pickax; with his left arm he aims a long arrow at his quarry, an unarmed young man. Flames are depicted beneath the horse, which is galloping away from hell’s open mouth (sig. K1r; Fig. 2.6). The inspiration for the woodcut is Revelation 6:8 “And behold a pale horse: and he that sat upon him, his name was Death. And hell followed him”; the young man

⁷⁷ James, Catalogue, 291–3, no. 256, early fourteenth century; Sandler, Gothic Manuscripts, 1:68–9, no. 60, ca. 1310–20; Rouse and Rouse, Illiterati et uxorati, 1:168. ⁷⁸ ESTC S101034, S120603. Although the second of the two editions has the imprint of Richard Pynson, a contemporary and rival of Wynkyn de Worde, the latter was probably the printer of both. See Driver, Image in Print, 227 n. 47.

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Fig. 2.6 Death as horseman. William Caxton, Book Ryal, Westminster: Wynkyn de Worde, 1507, Sig. K1r. © The British Library Board, shelfmark C11a23.

is an Everyman figure based on an original woodcut used by the Parisian printer Antoine Vérard, to whom de Worde had connections.⁷⁹ Despite their heterogeneous iconographies and conceptions, the manuscript illustration and the woodcut have important features in common. In the first place, they thematize death and hell as respectively the last thing that no one can avoid and the last thing that everyone must strive to avoid by all means possible. Death’s ineluctability is spelled out in the verses that accompany the picture in either case: “Whoever wishes to learn to die cannot escape death” (Qui veut aprendre a morir. / La mort ne puist eschapir), and “Remember frendes grete and smalle. / For to be redy whan dethe dothe call.” The fact that death’s victim in the manuscript miniature is a king would have resonated for the reader with a particularly vivid passage of the accompanying text, in which formerly powerful rulers now condemned to hell lament the fleetingness of their former lives and their terrible change of fortune: “One moment we were born and in the next we died, and our life was nothing more than a short moment; now we are in perpetual torment”;⁸⁰ the image therefore would have prompted the viewer who has also read the accompanying text to ask: “Will this king soon join the others singing ⁷⁹ Hodnell, English Woodcuts, 273, no. 962; de Worde subsequently re-used the cut to illustrate other titles. For the identification of the Everyman woodcut and its polyfunctional deployment, see Driver, Image in Print, 55–62. ⁸⁰ Laurent, Somme 40.18, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 174: “Or fumes né et tantost mort; ne toute nostre vie ne fu pas un petiz momenz. Or sumes en perpetueus tormenz.” Cf. Ws 5:13.

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their woes in hell? Has he done enough to avoid that horrible fate?” In the case of the woodcut, which portrays hell, the picture requires no reference to the text in order to provoke a similar question from the viewer: has the young man, whose death is just seconds away, lived a sufficiently virtuous life to avoid the fate of the miserable wretch who peers out from behind hell’s teeth? A second common feature is that in both pictures death aims a lethal weapon, either a spear or an arrow, at his quarry. Since a well-established iconographical alternative would have been to equip him with a scythe or sickle, the artists’ choice of a throwing-weapon is significant.⁸¹ Whereas the agricultural implement suggests the incommensurability of the reaper and the crop—the one human and singular, the other a collective vegetable mass into which all humans are subsumed without differentiation—the weapon foregrounds the similarities between death and his opponent. Both are human figures; moreover, the predator can aim his weapon at only one victim at a time, who thus assumes the status of an individual specimen standing for each and every other human mortal. Wynkyn de Worde’s use of the Everyman figure to represent death’s target is especially apt, because Everyman is the generalized individual who personifies every single human being.⁸² This pictorial highlighting of the representative individuality of death’s human quarry also fits neatly with the personification of death as conqueror in the text of the “Treatise on Virtues”: death’s adversary, forced to hand over all the years of his life, is “you,” the reader in other words, picked out and addressed as a single individual by the pronoun that can refer to each and every one of us.⁸³

5. Seeing and knowing The individual reader of the “Treatise on Virtues,” who is left in no doubt about her status as a mere specimen of mortal humanity, is instructed by the text to separate soul from body once a day and picture the torments of hell and purgatory and the delights of heaven. It is to these verbally stimulated processes of imaginative seeing that we now return. Ancient rhetoric had at its disposal a repertoire of techniques for procuring effects of immediacy and presence, so that listeners or readers could picture persons, objects, and situations as though they were present in the mind’s eye. Prominent among these techniques were enargeia, the vivid depiction of a scene or framing situation, and ekphrasis, the detailed description of ⁸¹ See Titzmann, “Der Tod,” 358–62. Even Death on horseback may be equipped with a scythe; an example contemporary with de Worde’s woodcut is Albrecht Dürer’s drawing King Death on a Nag of 1505 (Winkler, Zeichnungen Dürers, no. 377). ⁸² Paxson, Poetics of Personification, 46, analyzes Everyman as a specific kind of personification which he calls an “isotype”: “the representative of a greater number of entities ontologically identical to himself.” Boyarin uses the terms “sample” and “specimen” to describe the same relationship of representative part to whole (“Take the Bible for Example,” 33). ⁸³ Laurent, Somme 40.23, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 174. Cf. above, 83.

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a person or thing;⁸⁴ these devices came to play a decisive part in monastic reading and meditation, which were realized in a process described by the participants themselves as “painting in our hearts” (pingere in corde nostro) the images that the text caused them to see.⁸⁵ A sophisticated example of the rhetorical painting of images of the afterlife is Bonaventure’s Soliloquium de quattuor mentalibus exercitiis, whose imaginative evocations of hell and heaven appear to have been a source for the “Treatise on Virtues.”⁸⁶ The devout soul is exhorted by its guide and dialogue partner, the inner man, to “turn the ray of contemplation on the torments of the reprobate; see how they are of all kinds, how hard, how horrible, how intolerable they are.”⁸⁷ The terrors of hell are rendered all the more vivid and affecting because they are presented through the eyes and also the emotional and physical responses of others. Bonaventure strings together citations from Bernard of Clairvaux and Pseudo-Augustine: “I am in horror of the gnawing worm, the living death. O infernal region! How you are to be avoided! There [we find] the burning fire, the numbing cold, the immortal worm, the intolerable stench, the blows of the hammer, palpable darkness, the confusion of sinners, the bonds of chains, the horrible faces of the devils! . . . Woe to them for whom the pain of worms will be prepared, the burning flames, thirst without something to drink, tears and gnashing of teeth, tears to the eyes, where death is wished for but will not be given.”⁸⁸ The extensive evocation of paradise and the heavenly banquet places the devout soul right in the middle of the scene, its attention directed to one feature after another in a contemplative experience that not only is multisensory but has temporal rhythm and flow:⁸⁹ ⁸⁴ On enargeia and ekphrasis in rhetorical theory, see Lausberg, Handbuch, sections 810–18, 1133. ⁸⁵ Carruthers, Craft, 133, glossing the idiom as used by Jerome and others in the context of her discussion of the role of enargeia and ekphrasis in monastic orthopraxis. Peter of Celle’s instruction to “paint death before your eyes” (depinge mortem ante oculos tuos), discussed in Chapter 1, 27, is a good example. The same rhetorically based techniques of composition and reading were basic to all literature right up to the eighteenth century; see Vogt-Spira, “Senses, Imagination, and Literature.” ⁸⁶ The author of the Miroir du Monde was otherwise familiar with Bonaventure’s writings; his use of the latter’s Collationes de decem praeceptis, given at the University of Paris in 1267, is one of the principal factors that make it possible to date the Miroir compilation to the 1270s; see Mirroure, ed. Raymo and Whitaker, notes to lines 3589–90, 3593–625. ⁸⁷ Bonaventure, Soliloquium 3.6, Opera omnia 8:54: “converte radium contemplationis ad reproborum tormentum; vide, quam sint varia, quam aspera, quam horribilia, quam intolerabilia.” Trans. Etzkorn, 303. For the contents of the treatise and its management of the gaze, see section 4 of Chapter 1, esp. 60–5. ⁸⁸ Bonaventure, Soliloquium 3.6, Opera omnia 8:54: “Ego horreo vermem mordacem et mortem vivacem. [Bernard, De consideratione 5.12.25, SBO 3:488] O gehennalis regio! quam fugienda es, ubi est ignis ardens, frigus rigens, vermis immortalis, foetor intolerabilis, mallei percutientes, tenebrae palpabiles, confusio peccatorum, innodatio vinculorum, horribiles facies daemonum. [Bernard, Sermones de diversis 42.6, SBO 6 pt. 1:259] Augustinus: Vae illis! quibus praeparabitur dolor vermium, ardor flammarum, sitis sine potu, fletus et stridor dentium, lacrymae oculorum, ubi mors optatur, sed non dabitur [Pseudo-Augustine (Paulinus of Aquileia), Liber exhortationis 49, PL 99:253].” Trans. Etzkorn, 303–4. ⁸⁹ The dynamic aspect of “imaginative description,” whose coherence lies not in an exact and exhaustive correspondence of the description to the thing described, but in the descriptive articulation

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Take a moment to raise the eyes of your mind and you will understand what joys there are regarding those things around us; mull over them frequently with a devout mind. Therefore, attend carefully and consider the beautiful place which divine wisdom has built for you; look at the delicious food, the elegant decor, the precious treasure which the eternal power has gathered for you; notice also the famous assembly [of the blessed] with whom your mind can rejoice eternally by divine clemency. O soul, see how glorious, as Bernard says, is “that celestial city, that safe abode, the homeland containing all that is delightful.” See how luminous, how splendid is that celestial city . . . And who might be our food unless it be that most blessed Lamb . . . O how blessed are those who have been called to the wedding feast of the Lamb! [Rv 19:9] . . . O soul, reflect on these things with a devout mind. Imagine what joy there will be among those blessed spirits arising from the unbelievable dignity of the Server, from the wonderful charity of each of the convivial companions, from the delicious opulence of the dishes served, from the frequent and numerous [visits to the table] of the servers, from the dulcet echoes of the musical instruments, and [the voices] singing and praising the King of Glory, the Son of God! In this wonderful, great, and celestial gathering you will hear jubilant angels, apostles singing psalms, triumphant martyrs, confessors, and the virgins singing songs of praise, joyful patriarchs and the prophets, and all the saints and elect of God joined in praise of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit saying with one voice: Holy, holy, holy Lord God of hosts! All the earth is filled with his glory! Parumper oculos mentales erige, et quanta sint gaudia, quae de his percipies, quae iuxta te sunt, devota mente frequentius volve et revolve. Attende igitur et considera locum speciosum, quem tibi divina sapientia aedificavit; attende victum deliciosum, ornatum curiosum, thesaurum pretiosum, quem tibi aeterna potentia congregavit; attende etiam collegium famosum, cum quo de divina clementia mens tua aeternaliter exsultabit. O anima, attende quam gloriosa est “civitas caelestis, mansio secura, patria continens totum, quod delectat”. Bernardus. Attende, quam luminosa, quam splendida est civitas illa caelestis . . . Et quis erit ibi noster cibus nisi ille Agnus beatissimus . . . O quam beati sunt, qui ad coenam nuptiarum Agni vocati sunt! . . . O anima, haec devota mente pertracta. Quantum gaudium tunc illi beati spiritus concipient ex tam stupenda dignitate ministrantis, ex tam miranda caritate cuiuslibet sodalis convivantis, ex ferculorum deliciosa opulentia, ex ministrorum numerosa frequentia, ex musicorum instrumentorum et aliorum psallentium, cantantium et laudantium Regem gloriae, Deum Dei Filium dulcisona resonantia! In hoc caelesti, magno stupendoque convivio audies Angelos iubilantes, Apostolos psallentes,

of “an experiential whole” by means of narrative qualities or “plot,” is stressed by Carruthers in her account of ekphrasis in “Moving Images,” 290–1.

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  Martyres triumphantes, Confessores et Virgines laudantes, Patriarchas et Prophetas iucundantes, omnes Sanctos et electos Dei unanimiter Patrem et Filium et Spiritum sanctum collaudantes et una voce dicentes: Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus Dominus Deus exercituum, plena est omnis terra gloria eius.⁹⁰

Next to Bonaventure’s rhetorical tours de force, the instructions for contemplating hell, purgatory, and heaven in the “Treatise on Virtues” are sparing in their use of enargeia and ekphrasis. This economy is all the more conspicuous given the emphatic directions to the reader to see the regions of the hereafter. Moreover, the most sustained passage of vivid evocation actually falls outside the confines of the spiritual exercise. In order to press home the first point of his lesson, namely that this earthly life is transient, the author deploys another standard rhetorical figure of immediacy, prosopopoeia, the creation of a speaking character by endowing inanimate things or dead persons with speech.⁹¹ In this case the author places cries of pain and remorse into the mouths of deceased and condemned rulers and potentates, thus rendering the horrors of eternal damnation auditively immediate in “cantos of hell”: “Alas! what use to us now is our power, honor, nobility, joy, and vaunting? All has passed more swiftly than a shadow, than a bird in flight, than an arrow from the bow. In this way all our life passes. One moment were born and in the next we died, and our life was nothing more than a short moment. Now we are in perpetual torment, our joy has turned to tears, our merry dance to pain; headdresses, robes, amusements, feasts and all good things have fallen away from us.” Such are the cantos of hell, as scripture recounts them in order to show us that this life is merely a passage. “Hee! las, que nous vaut ore nostre pouairs, honeurs, noblece, joie, boubanz? Tout est trespassé plus tost que ombres ne que oiseaus volanz ne que carreaus d’arbeleste. Einsi trespasse nostre vie toute. Or fumes né et tantost mort; ne toute nostre vie ne fu pas un petiz momenz. Or sumes en perpetueus tormenz. Nostre joie est tournee en pleur; nos caroles en doleur, chapeaus, robes, desduiz, festes et tuit bien nous sont failli.” Tiex sont les chançons d’enfer, si com l’Escripture nous raconte, pour nous moustrer que ceste vie n’est que un trespas.⁹²

⁹⁰ Bonaventure, Soliloquium 4.9–12, Opera omnia 8:59–60; trans. Etzkorn, 320–3. The citation is Pseudo-Bernard of Clairvaux, Meditationes piissimae 4.11, PL 184:492d. ⁹¹ For prosopopoeia/fictio personae and the closely overlapping figure of ethopoeia/sermocinatio in rhetoric, see Lausberg, Handbuch, sections 820–9; also Paxson, Poetics of Personification, 8–34. ⁹² Laurent, Somme 40.16–20, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 174. The similes put into the dead potentates’ mouths are from Ws 5:8–12. The same verses are also quoted by Bonaventure in an extended ubi sunt passage which illustrates the vanity of worldly glory (Soliloquium 2.3, Opera omnia 8:45; trans. Etzkorn, 273–4).

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Within the instructions for the daily spiritual exercise, the only concrete details offered as direct objects of vision are found in the evocation of hell. Compared with Bonaventure’s flights of rhetoric, it is a tersely worded list of properties: “There you will see . . . burning fire, stinking sulfur, raging tempest, horrible devils, hunger, thirst that cannot be quenched, various tortures, tears, sorrows.”⁹³ Otherwise, what is immediately presented to the mind’s eye in hell are abstractions and generic categories, for which the meditator would still need to supply concrete instances of her own: “[There you will see] the absence of all good things, the abundance of all evil.”⁹⁴ The description of heaven is assembled from items also found in Bonaventure, but once again bleached of all temporal, sensory, and affective enargeia so as to leave a bare inventory: In that place is the glorious company of God, the angels and saints. In that place all good things are superabundant: beauty, wealth, honour and glory, virtue, love, sense and everlasting joy. In that place there is no hypocrisy at all, neither deceit nor flattery nor discord nor envy, neither hunger nor thirst, neither pain nor suffering nor fear of enemies, but every day is a festival and royal marriagesupper, songs and joy without end. La est la glorieuse compaignie de Dieu, des anges et des sainz; la seurhabondent tuit li bien, beautez, richece, honeur et gloire, vertuz, amour, sens et joie pardurable. La n’a point d’yprocrisie, ne barat, ne losengerie, ne descorde, ne envie, ne fain, ne soif, ne chaut, ne froit, ne mal, ne doleur, ne paour de enemis, mes touz jours festes et noces reaus, chançons et joie senz fin.⁹⁵

These lists do not open up a space for the mind’s eye to range over; there are no verbs equivalent to Bonaventure’s imperatives converte radium contemplationis, “turn the ray of contemplation,” volve et revolve, “turn over and over in your mind,” attende, “give heed to, observe,” pertracta, “explore, study.” Instead, the visual inventories are completely subordinated to the main goal of the “Treatise on Virtues,” which is to improve the reader’s morals: “Once you see that one mortal sin must be paid for so dearly [si chier], you would rather be flayed alive than dare consent to a single mortal sin”; “That joy is so great [si granz] that whoever tasted a single drop . . . would be so inebriated with the love of God . . . and this

⁹³ Laurent, Somme 41.6–7, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 176: “Illuc verras . . . feu ardant, sofre puant, tempeste bruiant, deables horribles, fain, soif qui estanchier ne puet, divers tormenz, pleurs, doleurs.” ⁹⁴ Ibid., 41.6, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 176: “Illuc verras . . . faute de touz biens, plenté de toz maus.” ⁹⁵ Ibid., 42.7–12, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 178. Correspondences in the Soliloquium are 4.3, 4.9–13, Opera omnia 8:57, 59–60 (glorious company); 4.15, 27, Opera omnia 8:60–1, 8.66–7 (superabundance of virtues and good things); 4.20, Opera omnia 8:63 (absence of vices and afflictions); 4.11–12, Opera omnia 8:59–60 (royal marriage supper, cf. Rv 19:9).

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exceedingly great love and the desire he would conceive to reach heaven would make him hate sin and love virtue a hundred thousand times more steadfastly than all the fear of hell.”⁹⁶ The intensifier “so” (si) implies details of horrific punishment and intoxicating joy which are not instanced, but from which the meditator is above all to draw the right moral conclusion: “Life has beauty and worth when one flees evil and does good.”⁹⁷ The description of purgatory, which has no parallel in the Soliloquium, is likewise denuded of detail. The sufferings of the poor souls in the cleansing fire are not so much brought into sensory evidence as they provide an object of doctrinal instruction: “There you will see the sufferings of the souls who were penitent in this life but not fully purged; now they are undergoing the remainder of their penance . . . The nature of this fire is such that it completely burns and purges any rust that it finds in the soul, by way of deeds and words and thoughts that amount to sin, whether small or great; in that place all venial sins, which we call the little sins, are punished and avenged.”⁹⁸ The moral for the reader is that she should resolve to lead as blameless a life as possible, while at the same time recognizing that “no one can live completely without sin”; hence the reader must also follow the example of godfearing Christians who, though they may fall seven times daily into sin, “take pains to wash themselves clean over and over again through holy confession and tears and prayers, and to make amends.”⁹⁹ The mental representation of concrete situations and objects was however only part of what the author of the “Treatise on Virtues” intended when directing the reader to see the regions of the afterlife. The perceptual and epistemological presuppositions of this direction must now be more fully explored. On the one hand, the modal adverbs par pensee, “in thought,” and par desirrer, “in desire,” suggest that the verb “to see” has its ordinary extended literal meanings of “imagine” and “grasp” or “comprehend.” The reader was evidently meant to realize a vision, however sparse, in the mind’s eye, and what was seen there was accredited with the full force of a pedagogical demonstration: “Purgatory will show you” (purgatoire te moustrera); “Hell will teach you” (Enfers t’enseignera); ⁹⁶ Laurent, Somme 41.10, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 176: “Quant tu verras que un pechié mortel i covendra si chier comparer, tu te leroies avant escorchier touz vis que tu osesses a un seul pechié mortel consentir.” Ibid., 42.13–16, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 178: “Cele joie est si granz que qui avroit tasté une seule gote . . . il seroit de l’amour Dieu si enyvrez . . . et cele tres granz amours et li desirrers que il avroit de la venir li feroit cent mile tenz herdanment haïr pechié et amer vertu que toute la paour d’enfer.” ⁹⁷ Ibid., 42.17, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 178: “Et lors est la vie bele et honeste quant on fuit le mal et fet on le bien.” ⁹⁸ Ibid., 41.11–12, 41.16–18, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 176–7: “la verras tu la painne des ames qui ci orent repentence mes ne furent pas plainnement purgies. Or font le remenant de leur penitence . . . cil feus est de tele nature que quanque il trueve en l’ame de ruil, de fet, de dit et de pensee, qui a pechié atourt, ou petit ou grant, tout art et espurge; et la sont puni et vengié tuit li veniau pechié que nous apelons pechiez menuz.” ⁹⁹ Ibid., 41.23–4, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 177: “Et pour ce que nus ne puet dou tout vivre senz pechié, car, si com dit Salemons, .VII. foiz le jour chiet li preudons en pechié [Prv 24:16], pour ce, par sainte confession et par lermes et par orisons, il metent painne d’eus laver et de relaver et amender.”

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in paradise “one learns” (aprent on).¹⁰⁰ On the other hand, because the seeing is programmed to occur in a sequence, whose order is “Go out, see, know,” and which is therefore analogous to the routine business of discovering facts about the external world from the evidence of the senses, the verb cannot be wholly assimilated to modern-day concepts of imagining and comprehending. So far as the author of the “Treatise on Virtues” and his readers were concerned, whenever they saw the places of the next world in the mind’s eye, or understood that vice was to be avoided and virtue pursued, they were not just entertaining mental images, making inferences, or assenting to what the voice of authority told them (though they were of course doing all of those things); in their belief, there really was something there to see. We could of course dismiss the author’s usage and the cognitive claims he makes for his model of perception as the illegitimate and inappropriate confusions they undoubtedly are from the standpoint of presentday philosophical epistemology and psychology. Such a move would not, however, serve historical understanding, which requires us to try to reconstruct the conceptual and theoretical conditions that made the cognitive program of the “Treatise on Virtues” not merely possible, but also compelling for the thirteenth-century author and his readers. The epistemological assumptions that underpinned the author’s claim that seeing transcendence par pensee and par desirrer constituted an act of real seeing, and that this seeing was moreover as good as knowing, were provided by Augustine. In his commentary De Genesi ad litteram (On the Literal Meaning of Genesis), Augustine distinguished between three kinds of seeing as a necessary first step to explaining the vision of paradise reported by Paul in 2 Corinthians 12:2–4.¹⁰¹ These were “corporeal seeing” (visio corporalis), perception with the bodily eyes of what is there to see; “spiritual seeing” (visio spiritalis), the picturing in the imagination of likenesses of absent things, whether these things are real (but recalled from memory) or fictive; and “intellectual seeing” (visio intellectualis), the grasping of abstract concepts that are neither bodies nor the likenesses of bodies; these concepts are placed on a scale of excellence, ranging from virtues such as forbearance, faith, and charity at one end to God himself, the “light by which the soul is illumined,” at the other.¹⁰² Although intellectual seeing reaches all the way to God, and although Augustine described the various kinds of seeing in order to ¹⁰⁰ Ibid., 40.58–9, 42.6, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 176, 178. ¹⁰¹ Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram 12.6–7, ed. Zycha, 386–9; Literal Meaning of Genesis, trans. Taylor, 2:185–8. The twelfth and final book is an explanation of Paul’s words about a certain “man in Christ” (presumed to be a reference to himself) who, “whether in the body, or out of the body, I know not, . . . was caught up into paradise”; it forms an appendix to the rest of the commentary, which expounds Genesis books 1–3, ending at the expulsion of Adam and Eve from earthly paradise. ¹⁰² Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram 12.6.15–17.18, 12.23.49–24.50, 12.31.59, ed. Zycha, 386–9, 414–17, 425–6; Literal Meaning of Genesis, trans. Taylor, 2:185–8, 211–13, 222. An overview of Augustine’s theory of perception is provided by Butler, Western Mysticism, 19–26; more recent discussions are Spruit, Species Intelligibilis, 1:179–86; Miller, “Relics, Rhetoric and Mental Spectacle,” 28–36; Newman, “Medieval Visionary Culture,” 7–8; Vance, “Seeing God”; Schumacher, Divine Illumination, 34–9.

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account for the rare and exceptional case of an apostle “caught up into paradise,” the important point to note is that there is nothing exceptional about the modes of vision themselves: according to Augustine, they are all routinely involved in everyday acts of perception and cognition. This is made clear by the example with which Augustine illustrates his distinctions. In reading and understanding Christ’s commandment “Love thy neighbor as thyself” (Mk 12:31), the corporeal eyes see the letters written on the page; the spirit or imaginative faculty pictures the neighbor, who may well be physically absent; and the intellect participates “through an intuition of the mind, by which we see and understand love itself” (per contuitum mentis, quo ipsa dilectio intellecta conspicitur).¹⁰³ The example also shows that the three kinds of seeing are interlinked in one single process which encompasses sensation and cognition, passive reception of sense-data and active mental intention. This interlinking takes the form of a hierarchy, such that no lower instance can function without the active involvement of the higher ones. Spiritual vision requires intellectual vision in order for judgments to be made in respect of its contents; corporeal vision requires the participation of both intellectual and spiritual vision, because in accordance with the intentionalist assumptions of Augustine’s psychology, nothing may be seen with the eyes of the body unless the mind intends to perceive something, and unless the imagination assists the mind by presenting it with intramental representations of the external objects seen by the eyes. The converse dependency does not hold: the higher kinds of vision may proceed without the participation of the lower.¹⁰⁴ By means of this hierarchy, Augustine was able to analyze and explain instances of perception in which something is definitely seen even though the corporeal eyes, the lowest agency, are not involved. Among these instances he included routine waking and non-waking occurrences, such as picturing an absent object to oneself or dreaming, as well as unusual events, such as hallucination, clairvoyance, and contemplative ecstasy. In all these experiences, either spiritual vision is said to be working in partnership with intellectual vision, or intellectual vision is operating on its own; the particular genre and status of any episode of noncorporeal seeing—whether it is a dream, a hallucination, or a vision of God—are determined by its cause, which may be organic (food, bodily humors, pain, delirium), or psychic (fear or shame experienced by the soul), or preternatural (a malign or benign spirit).¹⁰⁵ In states of contemplative rapture, the soul’s attention (animi intentio) is completely turned away from the corporeal senses and “its whole intent [contuitus] is upon images of bodies present to spiritual vision [in corporum imaginibus per spiritalem uisionem] or upon incorporeal realities present to intellectual vision without benefit of bodily images [in rebus incorporeis nulla ¹⁰³ Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram 12.6.15, ed. Zycha, 387; Literal Meaning of Genesis, trans. Taylor, 2:185. ¹⁰⁴ Ibid., 12.11.22–4, 12.24.50–1, ed. Zycha, 392–5, 416–17; trans. Taylor, 2:191–3, 213–14. ¹⁰⁵ Ibid., 12.2.3, 12.12.25–6, 12.17.34–8, 12.19.41, 12.21.44–23.49, ed. Zycha, 380–1, 395–7, 403–6, 407–9, 411–15; trans. Taylor, 2:179–80, 193–6, 201–3, 205–6, 208–13.

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corporis imagine figuratis per intellectualem uisionem]”; these images are presented to the soul by angelic or divine assistance.¹⁰⁶ Augustine further distinguished between spiritual rapture, in which the soul sees images similar to corporeal things (John’s vision of the Apocalypse is said to fall under this category) and intellectual rapture, where the soul is transported out of all likenesses into the region of pure intellect.¹⁰⁷ As examples of the latter Augustine cited the visions experienced by Paul in 2 Corinthians 12:2–4 and Moses in Exodus 33:9–11, in which paradise and God respectively are seen face to face.¹⁰⁸ Even when speaking of intellectual rapture, Augustine never displays the least hesitation about using the words visio and videre to describe the soul’s perceptions. This can scarcely be naivety on his part, since he was, as we have seen, acutely conscious of the differences between various kinds of visual object and various modalities of seeing—indeed, his entire explanation presupposes just these distinctions. The reason why Augustine considered rapture, whether “spiritual” or “intellectual,” to be a kind of seeing is twofold. First, according to his model of perception, the participating psychological agencies are no different from the ones involved in everyday acts of seeing, which Augustine took to comprise both sense perception and the making of judgments about sense-data. Second, the process of perception is the same for ecstatic vision as it is for routine cases of corporeal seeing or imaginative picturing: mental intention is directed at some kind of object, whether that object is a physical body, or the imagined likeness of a body, or a pure abstraction. Moreover, Augustine considered that whereas the intellect may err in its judgment of the objects of corporeal and spiritual (imaginative) vision, because these pertain to changeable things, it can never be deceived in respect of its own vision. This is because the abstract entities and concepts that constitute the objects of intellectual vision are eternal, and “either the intellect understands them, and then it possesses the truth; or if it does not possess truth, it fails to understand.”¹⁰⁹ Thus intellectual rapture, in which the soul has left all likenesses behind it and sees pure essences, unfailingly yields true and certain knowledge.¹¹⁰

¹⁰⁶ Ibid., 12.12.25, ed. Zycha, 395–6; trans. Taylor, 2:194. ¹⁰⁷ Ibid., 12.26.53–4, ed. Zycha, 418–20; trans. Taylor, 2:216–17. Given Augustine’s hierarchy of seeing, “spiritual rapture” must involve intellectual seeing too, in order for the images to be understood. The terms “spiritual” and “intellectual” denote rather the predominant quality, whether pictorial or abstract, of what is presented to the soul. ¹⁰⁸ Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram 12.27.55, ed. Zycha, 420–2; Literal Meaning of Genesis, trans. Taylor, 2:217–19. See also Chapter 1, 42. ¹⁰⁹ Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram 12.25.52, ed. Zycha, 417–18; Literal Meaning of Genesis, trans. Taylor, 2:215–16. Cf. ibid., 12.14.29–30, ed. Zycha, 398–400; trans. Taylor, 2:197–8. Elsewhere, Augustine takes up the Pauline distinction between wisdom and knowledge, sapientia and scientia (1 Cor 12:8), correlating infallible intellectual understanding with the former, and judgments pertaining to changeable affairs with the latter: De Trinitate 12.13.21–15.25, ed. Mountain and Glorie, 374–80. ¹¹⁰ At the end of his commentary, Augustine adds the significant qualification that even in intellectual rapture, the soul does not see with perfect clarity: that is possible only for angels, and for the blessed after the resurrection of the body; De Genesi ad litteram 12.36.69, ed. Zycha, 433–4; Literal Meaning of Genesis, trans. Taylor, 2:229–30.

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Augustine’s theory of perception must have been familiar to the author of the “Treatise on Virtues.”¹¹¹ Although there is considerable difference between the two writers in respect of their aims and the context of their writings—Augustine was trying to account for rare and extraordinary experiences of rapture undergone by towering figures of salvation history, the author of the “Treatise” to equip laypersons with textual directions for a spiritual exercise—the model developed by the former was relevant and adaptable to the purposes of the latter. All three kinds and objects of vision are implicated in the daily exercise of forgetting the body. If the meditator is actually reading the book at the time of meditation, then the corporeal eyes see the words on the page and also, if the codex happens to be illustrated, the accompanying images of resurrection, judgment, hell, and heaven. Whether they are seen on the page or recalled from memory, these words and images give rise to noncorporeal likenesses of physical objects in spiritual vision. This happens whenever the metaphors and personifications of death are imaginatively realized as a landscape through which the soul travels on its voyage out, and whenever the sufferings and delights of the afterlife are pictured in the mind’s eye. Finally, concepts and relations abstracted from those details provide the meditator with objects of pure intellectual vision: “Hell will teach you how [comment] God avenges mortal sins; purgatory will show you how [comment] God cleanses venial sins; in paradise you will see plainly how [comment] virtue and good works are handsomely rewarded.” The conjunction “how” in this inventory of the “three things . . . necessary for knowing how to live well and die well” is crucial to the linking of seeing with knowing. On the one hand, “seeing how” involves imaginatively picturing specific instances of divine punishment or reward. On the other hand, the fact that these specific images, which may vary from reader to reader, will be generated in order to illustrate general and constant rubrics (“the cleansing of venial sin,” “virtue’s reward,” and so on) is sufficient to ensure that “seeing how” goes hand in hand with knowing that venial sin will be cleansed in purgatory, mortal sin will be eternally avenged in hell, and virtue will receive its everlasting reward in heaven. Furthermore, because these abstract principles are dogmatic givens, what the “Treatise on Virtues” ultimately intends by “seeing in thought and desire” is a process which is completed only when the reader has grasped and assented to the unerring truths of Christian doctrine.

¹¹¹ The theory was summarized in Isidore, Etymologiae 7.8.37–40, ed. Lindsay. There is also a summary of the three kinds of vision in the principal source of the “Treatise on Virtues,” the Summa de virtutibus of William Peraldus, immediately before the exposition of the last two Gifts of the Holy Spirit, understanding and wisdom (pt. 4, chap. 10 in the incunable edition printed at Brescia in 1496, ISTC ip00085000). This digest would however have provided only the barest outline to the author, who must have known Augustine’s theory anyway.

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6. Proper and improper The “Treatise on Virtues” begins with instructions for daily meditation on the last end; it concludes by holding out the promise of an exemplary active life: Therefore let whosoever desires to lead a good life seek to possess the true good. Then he will have an honorable, profitable, and pleasurable life. And then he will live like a man, that is contentedly, wisely, joyously; contentedly without anger, wisely without error, joyously without sorrow; and to such a life one comes by grace and virtue and not otherwise. Dont qui veut bone vie mener quiere qu’il ait le verai bien. Adont avra il vie honorable et profitable et delitable. Adonc vivra il comme homme, c’est a dire seriement, saigement, joieusement; seriement senz courouz, sagement senz erreur, joieusement senz doleur, et a tel vie vient on par grace et par vertu et non autrement.¹¹²

Yet the true good, on which everything else depends, will not be immediately obvious to readers; in order to pick it out from the many false and lesser goods on sale at the great fair of the world, they must first sharpen their capacity for discernment. Accordingly, the main part of the “Treatise” scrutinizes the merchandise and makes fine distinctions between the different magnitudes and kinds of good. Temporal goods, the smallest on the scale, do not last; hence they are not proper goods. The same goes for the medium-sized wares, the so-called goods of nature and doctrine, such as beauty and strength of character. Not only are these perishable, they are not properly Christian goods because God bestows them on infidels and reprobates alike. The greatest and only true good consists in virtue, grace, and charity; without these, all the other goods will never become genuine, permanent values. Virtue alone confers true beauty, intelligence, prowess, lordship, freedom, and nobility—the honorable goods which are otherwise false and short-lived; the truly pleasurable goods are not mediated by the five senses, but are a gift of grace to those who are permitted to taste the fountain of divine love and the sweetness of the Holy Spirit; the only enduringly profitable good is charity, because it always gains and never loses.¹¹³ The discerning purchaser is therefore one who can judge and use the various goods of this world in the horizon of the true and proper good, which reveals the deficiency and ephemerality of all the others.

¹¹² Laurent, Somme 49.84–6, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 199. ¹¹³ Ibid., 44–9, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 180–99. The allegory of the world as a fair, where the foolish buyers mistake tawdry goods for ones of greater value, is introduced in the preamble to the examination of the different categories of good: ibid., 43.43–6, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 180.

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Discrimination between proper and improper goods, extensively and discursively elaborated in the main part of the “Treatise on Virtues,” is already being acquired by the reader through the daily spiritual exercise recommended at its beginning. On the face of things, there is a remarkable similarity between the goods that were the be-all and end-all of earthly existence for the rulers damned in hell and the blessings that the meditating reader will see in heaven: Now they cry in hell . . . “Alas! What use to us now are our power, honor, nobility, joy, pomp? . . . Our headdresses, robes, amusements, feasts, and all good things are finished.” There [in heaven] all good things are superabundant: beauty, wealth, honor, and glory . . . festival and royal marriage-supper, singing. Ore en enfer pleurent . . . “Hee! las, que nous vaut ore nostre pouairs, honeurs, noblece, joie, boubanz? . . . chapeaus, robes, desduiz, festes et tuit bien nous sont failli.” La seurhabondent tuit li bien, beautez, richece, honeur et gloire . . . joie . . . festes et noces reaus, chançons.¹¹⁴

Between these otherwise indistinguishable series of goods the reader who goes out once a day will nevertheless experience a difference in respect of substance and permanence. The good things of this life are (as the reprobate princes realize too late) mere fleeting shadows alongside their heavenly analogues, the “joy without end” (joie senz fin) which characterizes “the life of courtly lovers and noble and refined hearts” (la vie es finz amanz, es cuers gentis et afaitiez) in heaven.¹¹⁵ From the daily trip out of this world and out of the body it follows that the only good the reader may properly seek is in heaven; the model to follow, in the active life no less than in the practice of contemplation, is once again provided by the holy men, who “run like the greyhound, keeping their eyes on heaven, where they see their prey which they pursue, and for that reason they forget all other goods.”¹¹⁶ The labor of discriminating between proper and improper extends to language. Describing the pious Christians who dread the flames of purgatory, the author says that they keep not just their bodies and their five senses clean of sin, but their

¹¹⁴ Ibid., 40.16, 40.19, 42.7, 42.12, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 174, 178. ¹¹⁵ Ibid., 42.12, 42.33, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 178, 179. ¹¹⁶ Ibid., 42.22–3, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 179: “Li saint home queurent come levriers, car il ont touz jours les euz ou ciel ou il voient la proie que il chacent, et pour ce oblient touz autres biens.” The greyhound is contrasted with the proverbially timid hare in a simile which expresses the difference between those people who are motivated to do good out of positive love for God, and those who do so merely out of fear of being punished (ibid., 42.17–20, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 178–9).

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mouths also.¹¹⁷ The so-called “sins of the tongue”—lying, perjury, slander, backbiting and other speech acts which corrode social bonds between individuals— were an object of widespread moral concern throughout the thirteenth century; the proliferation of discussions in theological, pastoral, and catechetical literature has been linked to the rise of forms of orality in the vernacular, such as preaching by friars and regular confession for laypeople, which gave speakers new and urgent reasons to mind their tongues.¹¹⁸ A key figure in the systematic classification of the sins was William Peraldus, whose Summa de vitiis (ca. 1236) was the first treatment to append them to the canonical scheme of the seven deadly sins.¹¹⁹ Peraldus was the model for treatments of the topic in the vernacular. The author of the Miroir du Monde did not include the sins of the tongue in the “Treatise on Vices” with which he accompanied the “Treatise on Virtues,” though he evidently intended to;¹²⁰ Laurent did include them and, like Peraldus, he placed them at the end of the discussion of the seven deadly sins which makes up the bulk of the “Treatise on Vices,” so that in the sequence of the whole of the Somme le Roi the sins of the tongue immediately precede the ars moriendi introduction to the following “Treatise on Virtues.”¹²¹ Moreover, Laurent made his own amendments to the ars moriendi text in order to give these sins greater prominence. In addition to the statement, already in the Miroir, that there is “neither flattery nor discord” (ne losengerie, ne descorde) in heaven, Laurent included in the list of venial sins for cleansing in purgatory “idle words, sarcasm, mockery” (paroles oiseuses, gas, ¹¹⁷ Ibid., 41.20–1, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 177: “Cestui feu redoutent cil et celes qui a leur pouair se guardent netement de pechié mortel, et guardent saintement leur cors et leur boiches et les .V. senz de touz pechiéz.” ¹¹⁸ The fundamental study is Casagrande and Vecchio, I peccati della lingua; see also Newhauser, Treatise, 195–7. Lindorfer, Bestraftes Sprechen, situates the thirteenth-century preoccupation with the sins of the tongue in the context of an enhanced awareness of linguistic variety and deviation from the norm occasioned by factors such as urbanization and increasing competition between Latin and the vernaculars. ¹¹⁹ On Peraldus, see note 18 to this chapter. The final part of the Summa de vitiis presents reasons for guarding one’s tongue, before enumerating and analyzing twenty-four sins of the tongue and finally offering remedies (text consulted in the Brescia incunable ISTC ip00085000). See Casagrande and Vecchio, I peccati della lingua, 103–40; Wenzel, “Summa vitiorum,” 137–8, 151–2; Newhauser, Treatise, 196–7; Lindorfer, Bestraftes Sprechen, 58–62. ¹²⁰ Expounding the last of the four branches of the sin of anger, the author announces his intention to treat the first offshoot of this branch, strife (tençon), in another place: “We shall speak of this one along with the other sins of the tongue.” (De cesti dirons nous entre les autres pechiés de la langue.) For this detail and the contents of the “Treatise on Vices,” which is based on the Summa de vitiis, see Brayer, “Contenu,” 26–38. In Peraldus’ order of exposition, anger is the seventh and last of the seven deadly sins, before the treatment of the sins of the tongue, the ninth of which is contentio; see the outline of the work’s structure at http://www.public.asu.edu/~rnewhaus/peraldus/ (accessed October 10, 2019). ¹²¹ Laurent, Somme 39, “Dou pechié de langue” (On the sins of the tongue), ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 158–72. Laurent has ten sins, each with numerous subdivisions under which Peraldus’ categories are subsumed: idle words (paroles oiseuses), vaunting (vantance), flattery (losenge), backbiting (detraccion), lying (mençonge), forswearing (parjurement), strife (contenz), grudging (murmure), rebellion (rebellion), blasphemy (blaspheme). See the introduction to the Somme, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 58–9; Brayer, “Contenu,” 454–5; Casagrande and Vecchio, I peccati della lingua, 132–3, 142–3; Lindorfer, Bestraftes Sprechen, 67–8.

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trufes). All of these verbal offenses also feature in the inventory of the sins of the tongue in the preceding treatise.¹²² Thirteenth-century discussions of the sins of the tongue were concerned with language as a social institution and as a reflection of individual moral character: the stigmatized forms of speech were sinful because they inflicted harm on the Christian ideal of community and corrupted the speaker’s own soul. The author of the “Treatise on Virtues” not only shared these concerns of contemporary moral theology, but extended its attempt to distinguish proper from improper speech acts to include the signifying function of language as well. The ars moriendi is strewn with remarks about whether words in their ordinary and nonfigurative usage do or do not signify properly, in the sense of describing that of which they speak in its full truth and reality. “He who does not know how to live and does not dare to die is rightly called a prisoner [chetis, from Latin captivus],” comments the author, referring to the kind of person who fails to make her limits into her horizons, and consequently remains imprisoned in them.¹²³ “One says [l’en dit] of someone who is dying that he is passing, and when he has died that he has passed”;¹²⁴ the idiom is evidently right in its literal interpretation, since the author deploys it in order to demonstrate the truth of the statement that this life is death. But usage is not invariably correct. “You say [Tu diz] you have an age of sixty years, it is not true; death has the years”;¹²⁵ what the worldly wise, from their limited perspective, call (apelent) life (vie) is actually death (mort), and the death they call the end (fin) is the beginning (commencement) of life for the virtuous.¹²⁶ The impropriety of these, and indeed a whole range of everyday appellations will become apparent to all those who have expanded their horizons by going out of this world and themselves once a day. Heavenly joy “is so great, that whoever might taste a single drop of the smallest joy to be found there would be so

¹²² Laurent, Somme 41.18, 42.8–9, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 177, 178. Sarcasm (gas) and mockery (trufes) are species of idle words (paroles oiseuses): ibid., 39.23–25, ed. Brayer and LeurquinLabie, 159. ¹²³ Ibid., 40.4, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 173: “Et cil est a droit apelez chetis qui ne set vivre ne n’ose morir.” William of St. Thierry, Epistola 29, ed. Verdeyen, 234; Golden Epistle, trans. Berkeley, 19, also employed the prison metaphor to describe a boundary that should rather be viewed as a horizon when contrasting two views of the solitary monk’s cell: to the person who has only outward piety, it is “a prison in which he is immured” (reclusio et carcer), whereas for the inwardly pious person the cell is the “dwelling-place of peace” (domicilium pacis) and a “place of retreat” (secretum). ¹²⁴ Laurent, Somme 40.11, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 173: “Dont on dit d’un home, quant il muert, que il trespasse; et quant il est morz, qu’il est trespassez.” ¹²⁵ Ibid., 40.23, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 174: “Tu diz que tu as .LX. anz; n’est pas voir: la mort les a.” ¹²⁶ Ibid., 40.51, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 175: “ceste mort il apelent vie, et la mort, qui est es bons commencement de vie, il apelent la fin.” The notion that the words “life” and “death” more appropriately designate their opposites is Augustinian; see note 48 to this chapter. Cf. also William of St. Thierry, De natura et dignitate amoris 44, ed. Verdeyen, 211: “Deinde uenitur ad mortem. Hunc enim transitum ad uitam miseri infideles mortem appellant; fideles autem quid nisi Pascha?” The Nature and Dignity of Love, trans. Davis, 108: “Then [the soul] comes to death. This transitus to life wretched infidels call death! Yet, what do the faithful call it if not a passover?”

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inebriated with divine love that all the joy of this world would be to him as stench and torment, richness as dung, and honor as ignominy.”¹²⁷ The transvaluation of commonly esteemed temporal goods implies that the latter are in fact more properly and transparently designated by their opposite names: it would be more appropriate to say “torment” whenever people speak of joy, “dung” when they speak of richness, “ignominy” when the talk is of honor, a “beginning” when death is called the end, “death” when the worldly wise refer to this life. Moreover, because there is no intrinsic reason for the list of proper and improper appellations to stop where it does, the meditator is confronted with the prospect that large tracts of the everyday vocabulary whose literal propriety had always been taken for granted may, in the horizon of eternity, be inherently nonliteral. Repeating a definition which was already standard in antiquity and was to remain so throughout the Middle Ages, Quintilian stated that a trope is “the transference of an expression from a place to which it properly belongs [ab eo loco, in quo propria est] to another to which it does not properly belong [in eum, in quo propria non est].”¹²⁸ The “Treatise on Virtues” requires of its readers that they should always be putting improper tropes back in their proper place. The process begins with the very act of going out, when the reader undoes the impropriety of metaphor by mentally entertaining the possible world in which death can be literally a wall, a gate, or a stream. In the imaginary landscape through which the meditator passes in thought and desire, the metaphorical predicates are in their “proper” place. But when the meditator has come back in, so to speak, the process persists and multiplies, because now, in the active life, she ¹²⁷ Laurent, Somme 42.13–14, ed. Brayer and Leurquin-Labie, 178: “Cele joie est si granz que qui avroit tasté une seule gote de la plus petite joie qui la est, il seroit de l’amour Dieu si enyvrez que toute la joie de cest siecle li seroit pueurs et tormenz, richeces fiens, honeurs viutez.” The statement that all temporal goods are worthless compared to heavenly and divine ones is commonplace and derives ultimately from Phil 3:8: “For [Christ] I have suffered the loss of all things and count them but as dung [ut stercora], that I may gain Christ.” Cf. Bernard of Clairvaux, Letter 109.1, SBO 7:281: “favores, et honores, et dignitates reputantur ut stercora, ut Christus lucrifiat” (acclaim and honors and rank are counted as dung, that Christ may be the gain); Bonaventure, Soliloquium 4.3, 17, Opera omnia 8:57, 62: “O anima, si te aliquando delectant mundia gaudia, falsa huius saeculi gloria, brevis et caduca potentia; illic mentem evoca et omnia refutabis ut stercora [cf. Jerome, letters 112.15.5, 121.6.16, Epistulae, ed. Hilberg, 2:385, 3:25].” “Puto, quod si unam guttam de vino potus eius degustasses, omnem huius saeculi dulcedinem fastidires.” Trans. Etzkorn, 315, 329: “O soul, if at times worldly joys, the false prestige of this world, or its brief and fragile power delight you, at that point call to mind all of [heaven] and you will reject it as dung.” “I believe that even if you could taste but a single drop of the wine [of the heavenly banquet], then you would be bored with all the sweetness of this world.” The notion that ordinary literal usage is improper is stated explicitly by Philosophy in Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy 2.6, trans. Tester, 212–13: “Gaudetis enim res sese aliter habentes falsis compellare nominibus quae facile ipsarum rerum redarguuntur effectu; itaque nec illae divitiae nec illa potentia nec haec dignitas iure appellari potest.” (You delight to give to things which are really otherwise names they should not bear and which are easily shown to be false by the effects of the things themselves, so that this cannot be rightly called wealth, nor that really power, nor the other truly an honour.) ¹²⁸ Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 9.1.4, trans. Butler, 3:350–1. The definition is preceded by the words “as the majority of grammarians define it” (ut plerique grammatici finiunt). Similar definitions are given by the Rhetorica ad Herennium, 4.31.42, trans. Caplan, 332–3, and Donatus, Ars maior 3.6, ed. Holtz, 667.

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must track down and cancel out the impropriety of antiphrasis, the trope that is found whenever a word is dislodged from its proper place by another word whose meaning is the opposite.¹²⁹ Compared with the controlled impropriety of the metaphors, which are circumscribed semantically as well as temporally and pragmatically (they all connote the idea of a threshold, and are encountered within the confines of a once-a-day meditation), the impropriety of ordinary language is insidious and perplexing. Antiphrasis turns out to be rife in all kinds of everyday usage that speakers would normally consider literal and proper; there is no obvious limit to its contagion, no obvious principle that would allow one to determine in advance which usages may be immune. Readers of the “Treatise on Virtues” must respond to the stimulus of metaphorical impropriety just once a day, but all day and every day they must remain on their guard against the impropriety that pervades ordinary language and its way of speaking about the world.

¹²⁹ In rhetoric antiphrasis is usually categorized as a variant of the trope ironia; the latter term applies to phrases or whole sentences where the speaker’s meaning is the opposite of the utterance meaning, the former to single words. See Lausberg, Handbuch, section 585.

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3 Touching Eternity The Practice of Death in Heinrich Seuse

1. Circumdederunt me gemitus mortis “The groans of death encompassed me” (Ps 17:5). In Heinrich Seuse’s Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit (Little Book of Eternal Wisdom), a manual of spiritual edification written around 1330, this verse introduces then mutates into the articulate groans of a young man who has devoted the short span of his life to pleasure and suddenly finds himself caught in death’s snares.¹ The youth, who bears only the typecasting name “unready dying man” (unbereiter sterbender mensch), cites the words of the Psalm in Latin, before amplifying them (and their sequel “The sorrows of hell encompassed me, and the snares of death prevented me”) into a lamentation in German which is addressed to death in person: Circumdederunt me gemitus mortis. Alas, God in heaven, that I was ever born into this world! My life began with cries and tears, now I am going out with bitter cries and tears. Oh, the groans of death have encompassed me, the sorrows of hell have encompassed me. Alas death, alas cruel death, what an unwelcome visitor you are to my young and carefree heart! How little I expected you! Now you have ambushed me from behind, you have overtaken me. Alas, you lead me in your fetters, like an executioner leading out a condemned man in chains. I clap my hands above my head, I wring them in sorrow, because I am eager to escape him. In every direction on this earth I look out for someone who might help or assist me, but it is impossible. I hear death speaking his deathly words within me, saying “Neither friends nor wealth nor art nor wits may avail against what must be.” Alas, must it be? Oh God, must I really go from here? Is parting imminent? That ever I was born! Oh death, alas death, what do you mean to do with me? Circumdederunt me gemitus mortis. Owe, got von himelriche, daz ich in dis welte ie geborn wart! Nu was der anvang mins lebens mit schrien und weinenne,

¹ For Seuse’s biography and the composition of the Büchlein, see Ruh, Geschichte 3:417–20, 435; McGinn, Harvest of Mysticism, 197–204. The exact date is controversial: although ca. 1328–30 is the timespan widely accepted nowadays (see also Künzle in his edition of Seuse’s Horologium sapientiae, 32; VL 8:1114), a later date, ca. 1332, has also been suggested (Seuse, Buch der Wahrheit, ed. Sturlese and Blumrich, lxv). Meditating Death in Medieval and Early Modern Devotional Writing: From Bonaventure to Luther. Mark Chinca, Oxford University Press (2020). © Mark Chinca. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198861980.001.0001

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nu ist min usgang mit bitterlichem schrienne und weinenne. Ach, mich hein doch umbgeben die súfzen des toͮdes, die smerzen der helle hein mich umbgeben. Owe toͮt, owe grimme toͮt, wie bist du ein so leider gast minem jungen vroͤlichen herzen! Wie hetti ich mich din noch so wenig versehen! Nu bist du hindnan uf mich gevallen, du hast mich erilet. Owe, du fuͤrest mich in dinen banden, als der einen verdamneten menschen gebunden fuͤret an die stat, da man in toͤten wil. Nu schlahe ich min hende ob minem hoͮpt zesamen, ich winde sú von leide in einander, wan ich endrunni im gerne. Ich luͦgen umb mich in ellú ende diser welte, ob mir ieman geraten oder gehelfen muge, und es enmag nit sin. Ich hoͤr doch den toͮd toͮtlich in mir sprechen also: “noch vrúnd noch guͦt noch kunst noch witz hoͤrt da wider, es muͦz recht sin.” Owe, und muͦz es sin? Ach got, muͦz ich doch von hinnan? Gat es iezent an ein scheiden? Daz ich ie geborn wart! Ach toͮd, owe toͮt, waz wilt du an mir began?²

These anguished groans form the core of a sequence of dialogues which draw out their pedagogical potential; the resulting chapter, “How to Learn to Die, and the Shape of an Unready Death” (Wie man sol lernen sterben, und wie ein unbereiter toͮt geschaffen ist), is the first text of the “Learn to die” or ars moriendi genre in the German language.³ The unready dying man’s cries are overheard by a “servant of Eternal Wisdom” (diener der Ewigen Wisheit), a character who is both a surrogate for the author of the Büchlein and a focus of identification for its readers.⁴ His reaction reveals how much he still has to learn: “My dear fellow, why this terrible demeanor? Death is the common judgment that is passed on rich and poor, on young and old, alike . . . Did you believe that you alone would escape it? That was gross folly!” The dying man responds with a terse clarification: “I am not lamenting the fact that I must die, alas! I am lamenting because I must die unready.”⁵ The general predicament of which he is merely one example is now spelled out; amid sighs and regrets for a misspent life, he offers his own lack of preparation as a warning to all other young people: “Oh, you roses in bloom, who still have all your

² Seuse, Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit 21, DS 280, lines 10–27; Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 269. Seuse quotes the Roman Psalter: “Circumdederunt me gemitus mortis . . . dolores inferni circumdederunt me, praevenerunt me laquei mortis”; the Gallican and Hebrew Psalters read “Circumdederunt me dolores mortis [the sorrows of death] . . . dolores inferni circumdederunt me, praeoccupaverunt [forestalled] me laquei mortis.” ³ On the place of the chapter in the ars moriendi tradition, see Haas, “Heinrich Seuses Sterbekunst.” ⁴ On the figure of the servant, see Ruh, Geschichte 3:422, 436, 444. Cautioning against biographical interpretations, Ruh emphasizes the function that the figure performs, which is to allow the experiences reported in Seuse’s text to be understood both as authentic, because they are attributable to a particularized author-persona, and at the same time as exemplary and didactic, because the servant is a “type” whose experiences are generalizable to others. ⁵ Seuse, Büchlein 21, DS 280, line 28–281, line 8: “Liebe, wie gehebst du dich so recht úbel? Dis ist ein gemein geriht des richen und des armen, des jungen und des alten . . . Oder wandest du allein dem toͮde endrinnen? Daz waz ein grozú unverstandenheit! Entwúrt des unbereiten sterbenden menschen: . . . Ich klag nit, daz ich sterben muͦs, owe, ich klag, daz ich unbereit sterben muͦz.” Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 269–70.

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days before you, look at me and come to your senses, turn your young lives to God and pass your time with him alone, so that you will not come to share my fate.”⁶ When the servant suggests that the dying youth should take his own advice and turn to God and repent of his sins, because “All’s well that ends well,” the latter explains that in his case it is too late: he is like the foolish virgins of the New Testament parable who, when awoken in the middle of the night by the news of the bridegroom’s imminent arrival, beg in vain for oil to light their empty lamps; everyone, young and old, should take his plight to heart, and not rely on the merits of others, but instead do all they can in this life, when there is still time, to avoid eternal damnation.⁷ This pathetic lament succeeds in putting the servant in a receptive frame of mind at last; rather than make further inept suggestions, he asks the young man for guidance, so that he may be ready for death whenever it comes. The lesson is duly delivered: The best advice, the greatest wisdom and foresight on earth is that you prepare yourself through full confession of everything you know holds you in bondage, and act at all times as though you were going to die that same day or by the end of the week at the latest. Take it into your heart that your soul is already in purgatory and must remain there for ten years on account of its sins, and that you have been granted this one year only to help it. Observe it frequently, how piteously it cries out to you, saying: “Alas! My most dearly beloved friend, give me your hand, have pity on me, help me out of this fierce fire, for I am so wretched that no one will truly help me but you alone.” . . . If however you wish to join the small number of people who are not burdened by the terrors of an unready death, follow my teaching. See, the assiduous contemplation of death, and the help you faithfully render to your poor soul which cries out to you so piteously, will soon bring you to a state in which you not only cease to fear death, but even anticipate it with all the desiring of your heart. Just meditate on me every day often and thoroughly, write my words into your heart. Der beste rat, dú groͤst wisheit und vúrsihtikeit, dú uf ertrich ist, daz ist, daz du dich mit gantzer bichte und mit allen dingen, da du haft weist, bereitest, und dich dar nach haltest ellú zit, als ob du dez tags oder zuͦ dem lengsten der wuchen von hinnan súlest scheiden. Setze in din herze iezent, als din sele in dem vegfúr si und umb ir missetat zehen jar da súle sin, und dir allein dis jar verlihen si ir ze helfen. Sih si also dik an, wie ellendklich si zuͦ dir ruͤffe und spreche: “owe min aller liebste vrúnt, bút mir din hand, erbarm dich úber mich, hilf mir, daz ich schier usser disem grimmen vúre kome, wan ich bin als ellend, daz mir nieman mit

⁶ Ibid., DS 281, lines 27–30: “Eya, ir blüejenden roͮsen, die úwer tage noch vor ú hant, sehent mich an und lernent witze, kerent úwer jugent ze gote und vertribent das zit mit im allein, daz úch nit also geschehe.” Trans. Tobin, 270. ⁷ Ibid., DS 282, lines 4–5: “Ker dich ze gote, hab rúw umb din súnde; ist das end guͦt, so ist es alles guͦt.” The unready dying man’s reply follows at DS 283, lines 6–15. Trans. Tobin, 270, 271.

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trúwen hilfet denne du allein.” . . . Wilt du aber mit der kleinen zal dez jemerlichen unbereiten toͮdes ledig werden, so volge miner lere. Sihe, emziger anblik des toͮdes, dú getrúw hilf diner armen sele, dú da zuͦ dir als ellendklich ruͤfet, bringet dich schier dar zuͦ, daz du nit allein ane vorht stast, mer daz du sin oͮch beitest mit ganzer begirde dins herzen. Hinderdenk echt du mich alle tag dik ze grund, schribe minú wort in din herze.⁸

The whole of the conversation between the servant and the unready dying man is embedded in a second dialogue between the servant and his teacher Eternal Wisdom, a figure who is at one and the same time the personification of the Holy Scriptures and a manifestation of Christ, the wisdom of God (1 Cor 1:24). The latter dialogue frames almost all the contents of the Büchlein and offers a comprehensive program of spiritual teaching in two parts.⁹ Over the course of twenty chapters, Eternal Wisdom teaches the servant how he may come to know God by contemplating the passion and modeling his own life on Christ’s suffering. Four further chapters dispense precepts for the spiritual life, starting with “How to Learn to Die.”¹⁰ In order to disabuse the servant of his mistaken belief that learning to die is unnecessary, because the death of the body “teaches itself well enough, when it happens,” Eternal Wisdom commands him: “Open your inner senses, and see and hear; see the shape of cruel death in your neighbor, listen now to the piteous voice that you hear.”¹¹ This is the cue for the unready dying man to commence his groaning; as soon as he has given his advice and expired, Eternal Wisdom takes over the role of instructor again. For as long as the servant is young and blooming with health, he should take good care of his soul, just as the unready dying man told him to; at the hour of death, however, “you should regard nothing on this earth except my [i.e. Christ’s] death and my bottomless mercy, so that your hope will remain entire.”¹² Finally, after reminding the servant that “all the scriptures proclaim what great wisdom there is in fear and the assiduous contemplation of death”—a condensed paraphrase of Sirach 1:16 (“The fear of the Lord is ⁸ Ibid., DS 283, line 20–284, line 23; trans. Tobin, 271–2. ⁹ On the structure of the Büchlein and its program, see Blumrich, “Die gemeinú ler,” 65–8; Ruh, Geschichte 3:434–41. ¹⁰ The topics of the three other chapters are: Büchlein 22, DS 288, line 2: “Wie man inrlich leben sol” (How to live inwardly); ibid., 23, DS 290, line 10: “Wie man got minneklich enphahen sol” (How to receive God lovingly [in the sacrament]); ibid., 24, DS 304, line 2: “Wie man got grundlosklich alle stunde loben sol” (How to praise God unceasingly at all times). Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 275, 276, 286. The program is accounced by Eternal Wisdom as a coherent whole at the beginning of Büchlein 21, DS 279, lines 10–15; trans. Tobin, 268. ¹¹ Ibid. 21, DS 279, lines 27–8; 280, lines 4–6: “[Servant:] Herr, was bedarf ich lere des liplichen toͮdes? Er leret sich selber wol, so er nu kumt. . . . [Eternal Wisdom:] Nu tuͦ uf dine inren sinne, und sihe und hoͤre, sich die geschoͤphde des grimmen toͮdes an dime nechsten, nim eben war der kleglichen stimme, die du hoͤrest.” Trans. Tobin, 269. ¹² Ibid., DS 286, lines 26–8: “Aber so du in der warheit an die stunde kumst, und du es nit gebesseren maht, so solt du nút uf ertrich an sehen, denn minen toͮt und min grundlosen erbarmherzikeit, daz din zuͦversicht gantz belibe.” Trans. Tobin, 274.

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the beginning of wisdom”) and 7:40 (“Remember thy last end”)—Eternal Wisdom commands the servant to open his eyes once more and bring to mind the many people who died unready: Open your eyes, count on your fingers, look how many people round about you have died in the same way in your own time. Have a talk with them in your heart, join your own aged self to their company, as though it too were dead, quiz every one of them, see how deeply they sigh and how bitterly they cry when they say: “Oh, blessed is the person who follows that sweet advice and becomes wise through another’s harm!” Make yourself ready to leave, for truly you are like the little bird on the twig, like the person who stands on the shore and observes the fast sailing ship in which he will sit and voyage to the strange land from where he will never return. Therefore put your whole life in order so that whenever death comes you will be ready and may depart joyfully. Tuͦ dú oͮgen uf, zelle an dien vingern, luͦg, waz ir eblich bi dinen ziten bi dir toͮt sint. Hab ein kosen in dinem herzen mit in, setze dinen alten menschen, als er toͮd sie, zuͦ in, vrage sú mit einander, luͦg, mit welen gruntlichen súfzen und bitterlichen trehen sú sprechent: “ach, gesah in got, daz er ie geborn wart, der dem suͤzen rate volget und an vroͤmdem schaden gewitzget wirt!” Setze dich recht uf ein hinevart, wan gewerlich, du sitzest als ein voͤgelli uf dem zwie, und als ein mensch, der an dem porte des wassers stat und luͦget des geswinden ab vliezenden schifes, da er in sitze und hin vare in daz vroͤmde land, do er niemer me her wider kumet. Da von so rihte reht alles din leben dar nah, wenne er komme, daz du bereit siest und vroͤlich von hinnan varest.¹³

The various imperatives enunciated by the unready dying man and Eternal Wisdom—“Look at me,” “Take it into your heart that your soul is already in purgatory,” “Meditate on me every day,” “Write my words into your heart,” “Open your inner senses,” “See and hear,” “Have a talk with the dead,” and so on—provide the elements of an exercise for remembering the last end. If the exercise is not as tightly regimented as its equivalents in Bonaventure or the “Treatise on Virtues,” with their systematic directions and orderly sequence, this is only partly because the instructions are distributed over two dialogues and dispensed by two different interlocutors. It is also, and mainly, because the instructions themselves are often indeterminate. Some of the actions urged upon the servant (imagining his own soul in purgatory, daily recollection of the dying man’s plight, talking with the dead) are plainly intended to be performed routinely and repetitively. Others, such as writing the dying man’s words into his heart, are singular actions (though, once written, the words will presumably be

¹³ Ibid., DS 287, lines 14–26; trans. Tobin, 274.

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read over and over). Still others are ambivalent. Eternal Wisdom’s command “Open your inner senses” might be a single occurrence in the story of the servant’s many interactions with his teacher over the course of the Büchlein, or it might be the ritual that invariably initiates the daily act of remembering. The fluctuating and not always quantifiable level of iterativeness in the instructions that the servant receives means that Seuse’s reader cannot always tell whether they are integral to the exercise of remembering the last end, or merely incidental features of its narrative presentation. A further indeterminacy concerns the relation between seeing and hearing in the servant’s apperception of the unready dying man. Eternal Wisdom’s instruction “See and hear” (sihe und hoͤre) suggests that both senses will be equally involved, but in what follows the acoustic aspect predominates. No sooner has Eternal Wisdom spoken than the servant “heard in his mind” (horte in siner verstantnús) how the unready dying man “cried” (schrei) and “spoke” (sprach);¹⁴ visual gestures and traits which contribute to the plasticity and detail of the apparition, such as the wringing of hands, or the deathly pallor of the young man’s face, are not observed directly by the servant’s inner eyes, but described to him verbally.¹⁵ In the servant’s subsequent meditations, what persists is above all the voice generated from the Psalm: the groans of the unready dying man, written into the servant’s heart; the imploring cries of his own soul in purgatory; the sighs of his dead acquaintances with whom he talks daily in his heart. If the lesson accomplishes one thing alone, then, it is to recreate with each repeated act of remembrance, each conversation with the dying and the dead, the auditory experience of being surrounded, like the speaker of Psalm 17, by the groans of death.¹⁶ These indeterminacies probably explain the range of variation exhibited by the numerous late medieval adaptations of Seuse’s “Learn to die” regimen. The author’s own Latin translation of the Büchlein, the Horologium sapientiae or “Clock of Wisdom,” replaces the command “Open your inner senses” with a deictic formulation which assigns the unready dying man’s apparation unequivocally to the historic narrative of encounters between Eternal Wisdom and the disciple (as the servant is here called): “Therefore see now [nunc] the likeness of a dying man, as though he were talking to you.”¹⁷ A different substitution, but to the ¹⁴ Ibid., DS 280, lines 7–9: “Der diener horte in siner verstantnús, wie dú grimme geschoͤphde des unbereiten sterbenden menschen schrei, und dú sprach mit gar klegelichen worten also.” Trans. Tobin, 269. ¹⁵ The unready dying man describes the physical symptoms of death in the moment they afflict him: numbness of the hands, pallor, loss of sight, shortness of breath, cold sweat; Seuse, Büchlein 21, DS 285, lines 2–11; Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 273. ¹⁶ The auditory dimension of Seuse’s writings has been neglected by scholarship in favor of the visual: for example, Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary, chaps. 4 and 5; Lentes, “Bildlichkeit”; Falque, “Imagery.” A rare exception is Rozenski, “The Visual, the Textual, and the Auditory.” ¹⁷ Seuse, Horologium sapientiae 2.2, ed. Künzle, 528, lines 3–4: “Vide ergo nunc similitudinem hominis morientis, et tecum pariter loquens.” Seuse is though to have made the translation some time between 1331 and 1334; for the date, and also the relationship between Büchlein and the Horologium, see Künzle in the introduction to the Horologium edition, 28–54; Ruh, Geschichte 3:441–5.

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same effect, has been made in the stand-alone version of the “Learn to die” chapter that was excerpted from the Büchlein.¹⁸ Here, the introductory sections of the dialogue have been entirely rewritten, so that the speech situation and the identity of the speakers will be intelligible to readers without further context. A servant of God prays for instruction in dying well, whereupon Our Lord (Eternal Wisdom’s personification has been dispensed with) appears to him and says: “I will take you to the place where you will see and hear the shape of an unready death in the example of your neighbor”; the servant is then “led by divine ordinance” to the dying man.¹⁹ So far as the practice of daily recollection is concerned, the Horologium achieves more of a balance between hearing and seeing than the Büchlein, which confronts the meditator with the groans and the voice of the unready dying man. The “image of death” (mortis imago)—a term Seuse uses interchangeably with similitudo mortis (“likeness of death”) to refer to the apparition of the dying man—exhorts the disciple to “place my sad person, which you see, before your eyes often, and remember me continuously . . . Just think about me deeply every day, pay heed to my words assiduously, and write them in your heart.”²⁰ Finally, in the version of the Tafel van den Kersten Ghelove (Table of the Christian faith), a compendium of religious knowledge made for the Dutch court of Albert I by Dirc van Delft around 1400, “the dead image [dat dode beeld] of a youth who has departed from this world unexpectedly and heedlessly” is deprived of speech altogether and reduced to a visual aide-memoire by which the sinner may retain the gist of a long discourse, taken straight from the Horologium, that the Lord delivers in praise of the art of dying well.²¹

¹⁸ The excerpt version, with the incipit “Wir lesen von einem seligen menschen der het gott liebe,” dates from the fourteenth century and was one of the most copied chapters of the Büchlein. See Hofmann, “Seuses Werke,” 155–7, 183–4; Blumrich, “Überlieferung,” 193. I cite it from an early printed edition where it is included as an appendix to the exposition of the Ten Commandments by Marquard von Lindau (1320/30–1392), Buch der zehn Gebote, ed. van Maren, fols. [75]v–78r. ¹⁹ Marquard von Lindau, Buch der zehn Gebote, ed. van Maren, fol. [75]v: “ich wil dich fuͤren an die stat do du sihest vnd hoͤrest an deinem nechsten wie ein vnbereyter tod an einem sterbenden menschen geschaffen ist. . . . der diener wart in gotlicher ordenung geweiset zuͦ einen vnberaͤyten sterbenden menschen.” ²⁰ Seuse, Horologium sapientiae 2.2, ed. Künzle, 535, lines 18–25: “hanc meam, quam vides, tristem personam frequenter oculis tuis obicias et ad memoriam iugiter reducas . . . Hoc tantum facias, ut me cotidie profunde recogites; verba mea diligenter advertas, et ea in corde tuo conscribebas.” ²¹ Dirc van Delft, Tafel van den Kersten Ghelove, Somerstuc 48, ed. Daniëls, 3:613, lines 198–205: “Die sondaer seit: Ach Heer, waer-bi ende waer-mede so sal ic dese lesse onthouden, dat icker ymmer niet en verghete? Die goede God antwoordt ende seide: Kint, laet voor dinen oghen inwendelic alle tijt staen dat dode beeld eens ionghelincs, die onversiens ende rokeloes vander werlt ghescheiden is; daer-bi so salte dese conste alre best ghedencken, die di brenghen sal de sonden te scuwen, die duecht te wercken ende te verdienen dat ewighe leven.” (The sinner says: Oh Lord, how and with what may I retain this teaching, so that I never forget it? The good Lord answers saying: Child, always have inwardly before your eyes the dead image of a youth who has departed from this world unexpectedly and heedlessly; this image is the best way for you to remember this art, which will lead you to flee sins, do virtuous deeds and earn eternal life.) God’s speech in praise of the art of dying well (ed. Daniëls, 3:611–12, lines 155–78) is based on Horologium sapientiae 2.2, ed. Künzle, 527, lines 10–29; the latter passage has no equivalent in the Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit. On Dirc van Delft, the Tafel, and its

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These and still other versions are testimony to the enormous resonance of Seuse’s “Learn to die” chapter in religious culture before (and to some extent also after) the Reformation.²² The most important vehicle of dissemination was the Horologium sapientiae, which became the most commonly read book of devotion in western Europe in the fifteenth century after Thomas of Kempen’s Imitation of Christ.²³ The Horologium was moreover the basis for numerous translations into vernaculars outside of Germany, with a particular center of reception in the Low Countries, thanks to the high esteem that Seuse was held in by the leaders of the Devotio Moderna movement.²⁴ An excerpt version of the chapter—in Latin, Dutch, and English—also enjoyed great popularity.²⁵ In the following, however, the focus will be on the chapter in its original version and context. The Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit was a great success in the German-speaking world. Over 120 manuscripts have survived (seven of these are copies of the “Exemplar,” the compilation of his own German writings that Seuse made in the early 1360s in order to provide a model for copying and thereby assure textual quality and integrity), and there were four printed editions, either separately or as part of the “Exemplar” collection, down to 1567.²⁶ The Büchlein’s longevity was helped by the fact that its author was deliberately aiming for broad appeal. In the prologue, circulation in the Netherlands, see van Oostrom, “Dirc van Delft”; van Oostrom, Court and Culture, chap. 5; on its reception in Germany, Roth, “ ‘Tafel.’ ” ²² The dialogue between the servant and the youth is the basis for the conversation between one of the exemplary dying men and his confessor in the Münchner Spiel vom sterbenden Menschen, ed. Bolte, lines 1195–278. It also features, in the Latin version of the the Horologium sapientiae, among the exempla that accompany some printed editions of the Cordiale, seu quatuor novissima attributed to Gerard van Vliederhoven; on these, see note 122 of Chapter 4. ²³ See Künzle’s introduction to Seuse, Horologium sapientiae, 105–219: he lists 321 manuscripts, of which eighty-eight are now lost; their provenances, where these can be established, show that the Latin text was read and copied in every kind of religious order—monks, friars, canons—all over western and central Europe. ²⁴ For translations of Seuse’s Horologium sapientiae into French, Italian, Spanish, English, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Czech, and Hungarian, see Künzle’s introduction to the edition, 250–76. On French versions, see Ancelet-Hustache, “L’Horloge de sapience.” For the work’s reception in England, see Selman, “Voices and Wisdom”. For Seuse’s reception by the Devotio Moderna, see notes 5 and 6 of Chapter 4. ²⁵ Manuscripts containing the Latin death chapter as a stand-alone excerpt are listed in the introduction to Seuse, Horologium sapientiae, 236–8; for the transmission of its Dutch version, see Hoffmann, “Die volkssprachliche Rezeption,” 213–15. On the Middle English translations in prose and verse—the latter by Thomas Hoccleve—see Appleford, Learning to Die, 121–7, 128–36. ²⁶ Bihlmeyer’s list of manuscripts (DS, 3*–9*, 11*–15*), has been augmented over time; see Hofmann, “Seuses Werke,” 138–49; Blumrich, “Überlieferung,” 190–3; Handschriftencensus, http:// www.handschriftencensus.de/werke/512 (accessed October 10, 2019). It is difficult to put an exact number on the manuscripts of the complete text of the Büchlein, because the handlists and databases categorize the materials differently and often rely on information from older library catalogues which do not always provide much detail about the contents of their manuscripts. The figure “over 120” is an approximation, arrived at by comparing the data of the above-cited surveys; it includes manuscripts of the complete Büchlein, manuscripts of the Büchlein minus its third and final part, the so-called “Hundred Contemplations,” and also manuscript fragments of the Büchlein, though a proportion of the latter may be manuscripts that originally contained only excerpts from the work rather than its full text. The printed editions of the Büchlein are discussed by Blumrich, “Überlieferung,” 194–6, 197–9.

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he declared that the work contains “a general teaching in which he and all people may each find something fitting to them. . . . The meanings set down in it are simple, and the words even simpler, for they proceed from a simple soul and are appropriate for simple people, who still have weaknesses to remedy.”²⁷ The programmatic emphasis on simplicity does not mean, however, that the vernacular work was not also intended for a learned readership. In early manuscripts of the Büchlein, the text is accompanied by an apparatus of marginal glosses which identify its many citations from theological and philosophical authorities; these glosses, which possibly go back to Seuse himself, would have meant something only to readers with academic training.²⁸ Whether learned or simple, the person who read the whole of the Büchlein could not fail to notice that the commands marking the beginning and end of the servant’s encounter with the unready dying man, “Open your inner senses” and “Write my words into your heart,” have a programmatic significance which extends far beyond their local function in that chapter as metaphors for “Pay attention” and “Learn your lesson thoroughly.” Recurring in variant formulations throughout the dialogues of the Büchlein, the actions of opening the inner senses and writing in the heart are central to the program of meditation and spiritual edification that Eternal Wisdom lays down for the servant at the outset: “If you want to contemplate me in my uncreated divinity you must learn to know and love me here in my suffered humanity, because that is the quickest road to eternal

The stand-alone version of the “Learn to die” chapter was also printed as a separate work; details in Falk, Sterbebüchlein, 30–4. ²⁷ Seuse, Büchlein prologue, DS 197, lines 28–30, 198, line 11: “Er meint dar inne ein gemein lere geben, da beidú, er und ellú menschen, mugen an vinden, ein ieklicher daz, daz in an gehoͤret. . . . Die sinne, die hie stant, sint einvaltig; so sint dú wort noh einveltiger, wan sú gant uzzer einer einvaltigen sele und gehoͤrent zuͦ einvaltigen menschen, dú noh habent gebresten ab ze legen.” Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 208. ²⁸ See Blumrich, “Die gemeinú ler,” 52–3. The glosses are found in twelve of the fourteen parchment manuscripts of the Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit which date from the fourteenth century; their transmission is so stable that Blumrich considers them likely to be part of the authorial text. If this is true, Seuse must have intended the Büchlein for a broad readership in which all levels of education were represented; that in turn would necessitate a revision of the view, first put forward by Seuse’s editor Karl Bihlmeyer, and still repeated nowadays, that Seuse wrote the Büchlein primarily for women religious in the Dominican order who were under his pastoral care and generally lacked the level of Latinity needed to follow philosophical and theological arguments at an advanced level (Bihlmeyer, introduction to DS, 103*; cf. Newman, God and the Goddesses, 206; for an overview of recent work on the Latinity of women Dominicans, see Jones, Ruling the Spirit, 5–9, 20–6). Whereas the cura monialium, or pastoral care of nuns, may well be the context for Seuse’s own compilation of his vernacular writings in the “Exemplar” in the early 1360s (see especially Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary, chaps. 4 and 5; also Jones, Ruling the Spirit, chap. 2), it is important not to project this later situation back on to the years around 1330, when the Büchlein was first composed, especially since there is very little evidence for Seuse’s intensive involvement in the cura monialium before the middle of the 1330s (Senner, “Heinrich Seuse,” 19, 29). All this is not to say that the cura monialium had no relevance for Seuse when he wrote the Büchlein, merely that it may not have been the sole or determinative motivation for writing at that time.

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salvation.”²⁹ This is the Augustinian route that leads “through Christ the man to Christ the God” (per Christum hominem ad Christum Deum); although the full and open contemplation of Christ’s uncreated divinity is possible only in the next life, the souls of the faithful here on earth may achieve a presentiment of the beatific vision that will be the reward of the blessed in heaven.³⁰ That presentiment is achieved by meditating on the divine Word—that is, the Holy Scriptures and Christ, the human incarnation of the Word—in such a way as to elicit what has been called an “unlived experience” of what it is like to be with God in heaven: unlived, because the experience issues from a place outside the meditator’s lifeworld, and will only be fulfilled as lived experience in an eschatological future outside historical time. This unlived experience is hosted in the meditator’s heart, which opens its inner senses to the Word and inscribes the Word on the surfaces of its interior. Both commands, then, “Open your inner senses” and “Write my words in your heart,” invite a form of cognition that is sensory rather than intellective, yet does not unfold in the space and time of embodied sensation.³¹ In the case of Seuse’s servant, the unlived experience of being in God’s immediate presence brings forth paroxysms of joy which cause his soul to melt; the readers of the Büchlein, on the other hand, recreate the servant’s moments of rapture by absorbing themselves in Seuse’s text and allowing the interpretive constructions they place upon it to be disrupted by its sudden shifts of perspective and complex metaphors. These rhetorical features of Seuse’s writing, which strain intelligibility with their frequently paradoxical and alogical effects of associative combination, induce in his readers a sensation of dissolution which replicates the servant’s ecstasy: a dissolution of the self, and of the regular categories of embodied perception and cognition. It is this rhetorically induced sensation that Seuse’s readers take for their own unlived experience of absolute transcendence.³² ²⁹ Seuse, Büchlein 1, DS 203, lines 8–10: “wilt du mich schowen in miner ungewordnen gotheit, so solt du mich hie lernen erkennen und minnen in miner gelitnen menscheit, wan daz ist der schnellest weg ze ewiger selikeit.” Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 213. ³⁰ On Augustine, see Cassidy, “Per Christum Hominem.” For the application of the principle in Seuse and the Büchlein in particular, see Bühlmann, Christuslehre, 197–200; Haas, “Seuses Passionsmystik,” 110; Haas, “Seuses Kreuzesmystik,” 158–68; Blumrich, “Die gemeinú ler,” 53–5. ³¹ I owe the terms “unlived experience” and “hosting” to Patricia Dailey, who applies them to the visionary experiences of the thirteenth-century Dutch mystic Hadewijch. These unlived experiences of God do not belong to the mystic in the way that her lived experience of things in this world may be said to be hers; rather, the mystic “hosts” the presence of God in her inner senses and in her writings. See Dailey, Promised Bodies, esp. 22–4, 31, 79–85. ³² In proposing that the Büchlein should be understood first and foremost as a skillful deployment of language designed to induce sensations of out-of-this-world transcendence, I seek to develop and deepen observations by two scholars who have previously highlighted the rhetoricity of Seuse’s writing. Alois M. Haas, attempting to reconstruct the model of reading that Seuse envisaged for his texts, argues that readers are required to engage both rationally and affectively with their rhetoric, transforming it in the process into a force that will in turn transform them (Haas, “Seuse lesen”). Barbara Newman considers Seuse’s Latin as well as German works as examples of what she calls “imaginative theology”: a mode of writing that exploits the rhetorical devices of “metaphor, symbolism, prosopopoeia, allegory,

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Once this program is appreciated, it will be evident that all of the Büchlein, and not just its “Learn to die” chapter, is a meditation of death in the double meaning of the word meditatio.³³ In the first place, the discourse of the Büchlein promotes a disciplined concentration of attention on death, as the servant, and through his example the reader is directed to remember the last end—her own, the death of others, and above all Christ’s death on the cross. In the second place, the experience of soul-melting, which the servant undergoes at first hand and the readers of the Büchlein recreate through their engagement with the text’s rhetoric, is a meditation in the further sense of a “practice” or “rehearsal” of death: the anticipatory dissolving of the person so that she may enjoy an as yet unlived experience of what awaits her on the other side of death. This experience has an immediacy which resists all rationalization or objectification, because it is sensual rather than intellectual in nature, and it occurs along a surface where subject and object touch each other and the distinction between who is touching and who is touched has no application. Each of these three defining characteristics, immediacy, sensuousness, suspension of the distinction between active subject and passive object, and how the language of the Büchlein contrives to reproduce them in the reading experience of its addressees, are examined in the following sections of this chapter. The first discusses the highly polyvalent metaphors that Seuse uses to describe the writing process and also the readers’ reception of the Büchlein: metaphors of textual creation, such as weaving a garment or playing a stringed instrument, suggest that the act of mediation is capable both of killing the message, by turning it into mere words on “dead parchment,” and also of reviving it in all its primal immediacy, on the condition that the message is received by a “living heart.” The discussion next moves on to the role of the inner senses, the organs through which the living, receptive heart of the reader enjoys an unlived experience of transcendence; the “opening” or activation of these senses will enable the meditator to know God in a mode that Eternal Wisdom calls enphintlich, meaning “sensible” or “feeling.”³⁴ Finally, we return to some of Seuse’s prominent metaphors, this time descriptive of a meditative engagement with the words and names of God that will have the requisite quality of “feelingness.” Writing the scriptures in the heart, wrapping them in cloth, sealing God’s name in wax, or casting it in molten metal—all are metaphors of a tactile encounter in which the difference between the word that touches and the heart touched by it is suspended at the dialogue, and narrative” in such a way as to make them “double as exploratory techniques, enabling both writer and reader to visualize, conceptualize, and interact with emissaries of the Divine” (Newman, God and the Goddesses, 298–9). Both Haas and Newman are stating a general principle; through the sustained analysis of a single text by Seuse, I hope to add specificity and precision by showing the workings of the principle in detail. ³³ See Chapter 1, 40.

³⁴ Seuse, Büchlein 1, DS 202, line 9; Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 212.

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point of contact; in that encounter, the heart of the meditator experiences a dissolving of boundaries and a foretaste of the life to come that may aptly be described as a practice of death.

2. Dead parchment and living heart The prologue to the Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit opens on a scene of lamentation. “One time after matins, a Dominican was standing before a crucifix and complaining to God from the bottom of his heart that he was unable to contemplate Christ’s torments and passion, and how it was causing him so much bitterness, since he had been suffering from this great affliction for some time now.”³⁵ This turns out to be the start of a pattern which is repeated several times during the ensuing account of the book’s genesis: the author, identified simply as “a Dominican” and “friar,” and referred to in the third person throughout, suffers from some kind of impediment which is subsequently overcome with God’s help.³⁶ The story continues: while the Dominican was lamenting, “he experienced an unusual elevation of his inner senses, and he was suddenly and clearly enlightened”; in this flash, he heard the voice of Christ, saying: “You shall make one hundred venias, and combine each one with a different contemplation of my passion, and each contemplation shall be coupled with a prayer; you shall impress each suffering of the passion upon your spirit, so that you too suffer it for my sake, to the extent that you are able.”³⁷ While making these contemplations, the Dominican encountered a fresh obstacle. “As he was standing thus in the light and meant to count them up, he could not get past ninety,” but God intervened again, reminding him that he had already made ten contemplations before leaving

³⁵ Ibid. prologue, DS 196, lines 2–6: “Es stuͦnd ein bredier ze einer zit nah einer metti vor einem kruzifixus und klaget got inneklich, daz er nit konde betrachten nah siner martter und nah sinem lidenne, und daz ime daz als bitter waz; wan dar an hatte er bis an die stunde gar grozen gebresten gehabt.” Trans. Tobin, 207. ³⁶ Ibid. prologue, DS 196, line 2: “ein bredier”; 198, line 12: “der selb bruͦder”; trans. Tobin, 207, 208. The anonymous, third-person style of reference is maintained in all the passages of the Büchlein where authorship is thematized and discussed: chap. 13, DS 253, line 17–254, line 3; trans. Tobin, 249; preamble to the “Hundred Contemplations,” DS 314, lines 11–26; trans. Tobin, 294; epilogue, DS 322, line 21–324, line 2; trans. Tobin, 302–3. The construct of an author named “Heinrich Seuse” emerges only gradually over the course of the manuscript and early print transmission of Seuse’s German works; see Altrock and Ziegeler, “Autorschaft und Medienwandel.” ³⁷ Seuse, Büchlein prologue, DS 196, lines 6–12: “Und do er in der klage stuͦnt, do kamen sine inren sinne in ein ungewonlich ufgezogenheit, und luhte im gar geswinde und klarlich in also: ‘du solt hundert venjen machen und iedie venje mit einer sunderlichen betrahtunge mins lidennes und die betrahtunge mit einer begerunge, und ein ieklichs liden sol dir geistlich in gedruket werden, daz selb durch mich wider ze lidenne, als verre es dir muglich ist.’ ” Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 207. The venia is a form of prostration peculiar to the Dominican order, in which the body is stretched out on the ground on its right side.

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the chapter-house to take up his position beneath the crucifix.³⁸ Once he had fulfilled the quota, the Dominican’s long spell of contemplative drought gave way to a new period of spiritual fecundity. Not only did the hundred contemplations unblock his devotion to the passion, they generated further episodes of illumination and inspiration: “Thereafter he received many a shining inflowing of divine truth, which the contemplations occasioned in him, and there arose in him a talking with Eternal Wisdom.”³⁹ The Dominican decided to write up the fruits of his spiritual illumination for the benefit of others. The result was the Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit in three parts: the teachings of Eternal Wisdom on the passion and the spiritual life in Parts One and Two respectively, followed by the “Hundred Contemplations” in Part Three.⁴⁰ But the composition of the book was not all plain sailing. Whereas the Dominican had no trouble writing up the contemplations, in the case of the discourses of Eternal Wisdom it was not long before he hit writer’s block: “When the same friar had started to write up the three matters—the passion and the imitation [i.e. the two “matters” covered in Part One] and all that is written in the second part [the third “matter”]—and he had reached the words on repentance “Now arise, my soul” etc. [the opening words of Chapter 5], he encountered a certain resistance therein.”⁴¹ For the third time, an obstacle is surmounted with ³⁸ Seuse, Büchlein prologue, DS 196, line 12–197, line 1: “Und do er also in dem liecht stuͦnd und sú zellen wolte, do vant er nit me denne núnzig. Do begerte er ze got also: ‘minneklicher herre, du hattest gemeinet von hunderten, und ich envinde nit me denne núnzig.’ Do wart er gewiset dennoch uf zehen, die hate er vor in dem capittel genomen, e daz er nah siner gewonheit die gelichnús sins ellenden usfuͤrens in den tot hetti begangen und under daz selb kruzifixus were komen.” Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 207. The passage reveals that it was the Dominican’s practice (gewonheit) not only to contemplate the passion in his mind, but at the same time to imitate it by treating the route he regularly followed from the chapter-house to the crucifix as a likeness (gelichnús) of the via dolorosa. ³⁹ Seuse, Büchlein prologue, DS 197, lines 12–14: “Dar nah gewan er mengen liechten influz goͤtlicher warheit, dero sú im ein ursach waren, und stuͦnt in im uf ein kosen mit der Ewigen Wisheit.” Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 208. ⁴⁰ The “Hundred Contemplations” were the most frequently excerpted part of the Büchlein. Seuse himself recognized their appeal, since he specifically exempted the “Hundred Contemplations” from his general prohibition of making excerpts from the Büchlein (epilogue, DS 325, lines 22–3; Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 304). The most recent stocktaking counted 248 manuscripts with the “Hundred Contemplations” as a self-contined devotional work: Blumrich, “Überlieferung,” 193; for detailed inventories, see Bihlmeyer in DS 17*; Hofmann, pp. 149–54, 183 (nos. 154–214, 471–745a). Seuse did not include the contemplations in his text of the Horologium sapientiae, but a few manuscripts append a Latin translation which was made in the Netherlands; see Künzle, introduction to Horologium edition, 281–2. ⁴¹ Seuse, Büchlein prologue, DS 198, lines 12–15: “Es geschah, do der selb bruͦder die drie materien: daz liden und daz nachvolgen und daz ander alles, daz da stet, hate an gevangen ze schribenne und komen waz bis dar von der rúwe: nu wol uf sel minú etc., do hatte er etwas stozes dar inne.” Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 208. Cf. ibid. 5, DS 211, line 4; trans. Tobin, 219. In its extended meaning MHG stôz (lit. “blow”) refers to an obstacle, clash, adversity, strife (Benecke, Müller, and Zarncke, Mittelhochdeutsches Wörterbuch; Lexer, Mittelhochdeutsches Handwörterbuch, s.v.). Although it is possible, therefore, that Seuse may be alluding in this passage to external difficulties (his suspension from his teaching position on suspicion of heresy and his accusation before the General or Provincial Chapter of the Dominican Order at Maastricht in 1330), the immediately following vision of the needle and thread (see next note) makes it more likely that he is describing a case of writer’s block. The equivalent passage in the Horologium sapientiae refers to the obstacle as “adversity, the trier of the good” (prologus, ed. Künzle,

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divine assistance. During a midday nap, the author had a vision in which two persons dressed in religious habits handed him a needle and indicated he should thread it for them. The yarn, however, consisted of three separate strands— symbolizing the three “matters” of the dialogues with Eternal Wisdom—which the author, try as he might, could not twist into one so as to pass them through the needle’s eye.⁴² Then, on his right-hand side he noticed the figure of Christ, just released from the scourging-pillar: “And as [Christ] stood thus so lovingly before him and gazed on him with such kindly eyes, the Dominican raised his hands and stroked them over the bleeding wounds, then he took the three strands of the yarn and twisted them together in no time.”⁴³ The purpose of the story of how the Büchlein came to be written is threefold. First, although it is impossible to locate the narrated events precisely in the biography of a named individual (the temporal, spatial, and personal references remain too indefinite), the prologue leaves readers in no doubt that the whole book is grounded in the prior experiences of its author.⁴⁴ Second, the narrative 370, lines 5–6: “examinatrix bonorom adversitas”), but Seuse’s later choice of Latin phrase does not necessarily clarify the meaning of his earlier German; it may reflect changed intentions on his part. On Seuse’s suspension and accusation, see Ruh, Geschichte 3:418–19; Senner, “Heinrich Seuse,” 24–9. ⁴² Seuse, Büchlein prologue, DS 198, lines 15–24; Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 208–9. Although the reference of the “three matters” (DS 198, line 12) to which the three strands of the thread correspond is not entirely transparent, I do not think that Seuse means the whole Büchlein with its three parts (cf. the editor’s note to DS 198, line 21; trans. Tobin, 394 n. 7; Seuse, Horologium, ed. Künzle, 34; Lentes, “Bildlichkeit,” 39). First, ander in the phrase “daz ander alles, daz da stet” (DS 198, line 13) is an ordinal numeral (“second”), not an adjective (“all the other contents of the book”). Second, the author’s specification that “two parts [of the thread] were very small indeed, but the third part was a little bigger” (DS 198, lines 21–2: “zwei teil waren gar klein, aber der dritte teil waz ein wenig groͤzer”) does not have to refer to relative sizes measured in pages (Parts Two and Three of the Büchlein are both considerably shorter than Part One); it could allude to the fact that contemplation of the passion is the most important of the three matters, providing the basis for the other two. Third, the context suggests that the author is here talking about his problems with the dialogues (i.e. Parts One and Two) alone: in the immediately preceding sections of the prologue (DS 197, line 12–198, line 11; trans. Tobin, 208) he discusses the literary format adopted for the presentation of the illuminations he received after he had already written up the “Hundred Contemplations.” ⁴³ Seuse, Büchlein prologue, DS 199, lines 6–9: “Und do er also minneklich vor im stuͦnt und in so guͤtlich an sah, do huͦb der brediger sin hende uf und streich sú an sin bluͦtigen wunden hin und her, und nam denne dú drú teil des vadems und trate sú geswind zesamen.” Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 209. In the epilogue to the Büchlein, the author reports that he suffered a renewed bout of writer’s block, brought on by the feeling that God had withdrawn his grace from him, when he was composing Chapter 16 (“Of the worthy praise of the pure queen of heaven”); he therefore left a space in his manuscript until such time as God might give him the grace to write it (DS 322, lines 21–6; trans. Tobin, 302). Inspiration came on the eve of the feast of Saint Dominic, in the guise of a vision in which a handsome youth, accompanied by four others, completed an embroidered image of the Virgin; the following morning the chapter was done (DS 322, line 27–324, line 2; trans. Tobin, 302–3). ⁴⁴ Episodes in the Büchlein sometimes do correspond to incidents narrated in the Vita and consequently can be assigned a specific place in the life-story of the “servant” (as the biographical subject of the Vita is styled). For example, the Dominican’s practice of performing venias in the chapter-house, reported in the Büchlein prologue (DS 196, line 15–197, line 1; Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 207) is described extensively in Vita 13 (DS 34–7; Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 83–6); Eternal Wisdom’s reference to the many occasions on which the servant’s cheerfulness in suffering has enabled him to triumph over his enemies (Büchlein 13, DS 252, lines 7–9; Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 248) has its

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emplotment, along with the choice of descriptive language, establishes that these experiences were divine illuminations, received by an author who had been battling chronic spiritual drought. They were contemplations that occurred to him all at once “while he was standing in the light” (do er also in dem liecht stuͦnd), and heavenly discourses that arose within him once he found himself graced with “many a shining inflowing of divine truth” (mengen liechten influz goͤtlicher warheit).⁴⁵ Third, the apparition of the scourged Christ “in a bright sleep” (in einem liehten schlafe) surrounds the authorial enterprise with an aura of divine legitimacy, since the writing down of the discourses of Eternal Wisdom was evidently assisted and sanctioned by God in person.⁴⁶ Biographical authenticity, divine inspiration, and divine legitimacy together endow the Dominican’s writing with an authority so compelling that readers must seek to conform their own engagement with the text to the model of the author’s prior encounters with divinity. The account of the vision that undid his writer’s block concludes by saying that once the Dominican had rubbed his hands in Christ’s blood, he was given a power, and understood that he was to finish the task, and that with the rose-colored garment that is blissfully woven from his wounds God wished to clothe in eternal beauty those who now pass their time with it. do wart im gegeben ein vermugen und verstuͦnt es also, daz er es soͤlti volbringen und daz got mit roͮsvarwem kleid, daz usser sinen wunden wuͤnklich gewúrkt ist, die woͤlte in ewiger schonheit kleiden, die nu ir stunden hie mit vertribin.⁴⁷

The metaphor of the garment derives from Paul’s reminder to the faithful that through baptism they have “put on” Christ as clothing (Gal 3:27; NT Greek enduein, Lat. induere, “put on, dress oneself in”). Here, the garment woven from the bloody wounds of the suffering Christ is a metaphor for the text whose subject is the passion. God’s wish that readers should be clothed in it, in other words should metaphorically wear Christ’s wounds next to their own skin, amounts to a directive to convert their engagement with the text into an engagement with the

counterpart in Vita 29 (DS 84–6; Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 121–4). The Vita is however a highly stylized spiritual autobiography, in which Seuse and perhaps other authors were recycling an already existing repertoire of written materials. See Peters, Religiöse Erfahrung, 135–42. ⁴⁵ Seuse, Büchlein prologue, DS 196, line 12; 197, line 12; Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 207, 208. ⁴⁶ Ibid., DS 198, lines 16–17; trans. Tobin, 208. A comparable strategy of establishing divine sanction for human authorship through the staging of an impasse that God alone can resolve is pursued by Seuse in the prologue to the “Exemplar.” Here it is not the act of writing that is blocked, but the author’s plans for publication: he had been sending his finished texts to be read over and approved by his superior, Bartholomaeus von Bolsenheim, when the latter died. The obstacle to publication was overcome when Bartholomaeus subsequently appeared to the author in a vision, bearing the message that God wishes the works to be disseminated (DS 5, line 12–6, line 10; trans. Tobin, 59). ⁴⁷ Seuse, Büchlein prologue, DS 199, lines 9–13; Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 209.

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passion that will be just as immediate, just as divinely illuminated and sanctioned, as the Dominican’s own experience was.⁴⁸ Interposing itself however between the reader’s engagement with the passion and the author’s is the literary form of the dialogue. Whereas the “Hundred Contemplations” replicate, in their structure if not in their actual words, the original contemplations as they occurred to the Dominican in his state of unusual elevation and sudden enlightenment, the discourses of Eternal Wisdom in Parts One and Two of the Büchlein are not the transcription of his subsequent illuminations, but have been written up in accordance with literary canons of representation.⁴⁹ The Dominican’s actual conversation with Eternal Wisdom “did not occur as bodily talking [mit einem liplichen kosenne], nor with answers pictured in the mind [noh mit bildricher entwúrt],” in other words, there was neither a physically present interlocutor nor some kind of imaginary or allegorical personification.⁵⁰ Rather, “it occurred solely through contemplation in the light of the Holy Scriptures, whose answer can in no way deceive.”⁵¹ Moreover, the process of this contemplation had none of the formal characteristics of a conversation, real or imagined; as the author is at pains to point out, neither the assignment of words to speaking persons in the written dialogues nor the persons themselves possess any reality beyond the status of pedagogically efficacious fictions: Therefore he [the Dominican] sets out the teaching in the manner of questions and answers, so as to make it more palatable, not because he is the person to whom it pertains, or from whose own mouth it came. His purpose is to provide a general teaching, in which he and all people may each find something that is fitting to them.

⁴⁸ The transitive quality of exemplarity in Seuse’s writing (Christ’s example molds the author, whose example in its turn molds the reader) is emphasized in the seminal discussion of the Vita by Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary, chap. 5. ⁴⁹ The textual and performative structure of the “Hundred Contemplations” mirrors the instructions issued to the Dominican by Christ in the prologue to the Büchlein (DS 196, lines 6–12; Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 207; see note 37 to this chapter). Each contemplation names an aspect of the passion; groups of five or ten are each followed by a prayer to Christ or the Virgin; readers are directed to learn the texts by heart and rehearse them daily, while making one hundred venias accompanied by the Lord’s Prayer or, where appropriate, a Hail Mary (DS 314, lines 11–19; trans. Tobin, 294). ⁵⁰ Ibid. prologue, DS 197, lines 14–15; trans. Tobin, 208. In MHG dictionaries bilderîche is defined as “rich in imagery, figurative, in the manner of a parable” (cf. Benecke, Müller, and Zarncke, Mittelhochdeutsches Wörterbuch; Lexer, Mittelhochdeutsches Handwörterbuch; Mittelhochdeutsches Wörterbuch, s.v.); in Seuse’s usage it can however sometimes mean “having the status of a phantasma,” i.e. a mental representation entertained by the imaginative faculty or phantasia. Cf. Vita 51, DS 183, lines 8–9, where the phrase bildrich vision, translated by Tobin as “vivid visions” (Exemplar, 195), actually corresponds exactly to Augustine’s category of “spiritual seeing” (spiritalis visio), i.e. mental representations of objects of the corporeal senses. For Augustine’s distinction between corporeal, spiritual, and intellectual modes of seeing, see Chapter 2, 99–101. ⁵¹ Seuse, Büchlein prologue, DS 197, lines 15–16: “es geschah allein mit betrahtunge in dem lieht der heiligen schrift, der entwúrt bi núti getriegen mag.” Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 208.

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As befits a teacher, he impersonates all people: on one occasion he speaks in the person of a sinner, on another in the person of someone who has achieved spiritual perfection; sometimes he speaks in the image of the loving soul or, according to the matter in hand, in the likeness of a servant with whom Eternal Wisdom speaks. Und die lere git er also vúr in vragwise, dar umb daz si dest begirlicher sie, nút daz er der si, den es an gehoͤret, oder daz er es von im selber hab gesprochen. Er meint dar inne ein gemein lere geben, da beidú, er und ellú menschen, mugen an vinden, ein ieklicher daz, daz in an gehoͤret. Er nimt sich an, als ein lerer tuͦn sol, aller menschen person: nu redet er in eins súndigen menschen person, denne in eins volkomen menschen person, etwenne in der minnenden sele bilde, dar nah als dú materie ist, in einer gelichnúze eines dieners, mit dem dú Ewige Wisheit redet.⁵²

The discourses of Eternal Wisdom in Parts One and Two of the Büchlein are therefore an example of the literary genre of the pedagogical dialogue between a teacher of wisdom—whether a human figure or a personification—and a disciple; the great models, which Seuse knew and used, were Gregory the Great’s Dialogues and Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy.⁵³ Notwithstanding their literary overdetermination, the dialogues of the Büchlein share common textual ground with the experiences that preceded them. That common ground is the scriptures. The Dominican’s illuminations occurred “through contemplation in the light of the Holy Scriptures”; the written dialogues with Eternal Wisdom quote the Bible and other Christian authorities, either in their exact words or according to their meaning.⁵⁴ Eternal Wisdom’s character is moreover the personification of the scriptures and their meaning as expounded by the doctors of the church; as the author explains, the dialogues have been constructed in such a way that the answers are taken either from the mouth of Eternal Wisdom, as she herself spoke in the gospel, or from the highest doctors; and they comprise either the same words, or the same meaning, or such truth as comports with the meaning of the Holy Scriptures, from whose mouth Eternal Wisdom spoke.

⁵² Ibid., DS 197, line 26–198, line 5; trans. Tobin, 208. Cf. Horologium sapientiae prologue, ed. Künzle, 366, lines 6–19. ⁵³ Only the Dialogues of Gregory the Great are directly quoted in the Büchlein; see the list of cited authorities in Blumrich, “Die gemeinú ler,” 68–70. The influence of Boethius is palpable in Latin formulations of the Horologium sapientiae; see the index of sources and citations in Künzle’s edition s.v. “Boethius”; also Vollmann, “Stil und Anspruch,” 92–3. ⁵⁴ The biblical quotations and allusions are noted in the apparatus of DS; for a list of authoritative citations in the Büchlein, see Blumrich, “Die gemeinú ler,” 68–70.

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also daz die entwúrt genomen sint eintweder von der Ewigen Wisheit munde, die si selber sprach an dem evangelio, oder aber von dien hoͤhsten lerern; und begrifent eintweder dú selben wort oder den selben sin oder aber sogetan warheit, dú nah dem sinne der heiligen scrift geriht ist, usser der mund dú Ewige Wisheit hat geredet.⁵⁵

Whether the Bible verses whose words and meanings are the basis of Eternal Wisdom’s speech are the very same ones as the Dominican was contemplating during his illuminations cannot be determined. There is likewise no way of telling whether the many patristic and postpatristic citations that are worked into Eternal Wisdom’s discourse are identical with any that the Dominican may have called up from his memory while meditating on the scriptures. Yet although the text on the page may not necessarily reproduce the text that was in the author’s mind, there can be no doubt that the reader starts out from the same base as the author: from the words of Eternal Wisdom, whether these are contemplated in the Bible or in the dialogues of the Büchlein. Potentially, then, the reader who contemplates in the light of the text may be visited by shining inflowings of divine truth just as the Dominican was. That potential is elaborated negatively in the first instance. The report of the vision, in which the author rubs his hands in the blood of the passion and expresses the hope that the rose-red garment of Christ’s suffering will similarly clothe his readers, is immediately followed by an expansive acknowledgment of the danger that textual mediation will destroy all possibility of illumination: One thing must be known. Just as there is no likeness between hearing the sweet music of a sweet stringed instrument at first hand and hearing another person merely speak of it, so there is no likeness between words received in pure grace that flow from a living heart through a living mouth, and those same words when they are set down on dead parchment, especially in the German language. For then they somehow grow cold, and lose their color like broken roses, because the charming melody, which above all else stirs the human heart, is extinguished, and they are received in the dryness of dry hearts. No matter how sweet the string, if it is stretched over dry wood it will emit no sound. A heart devoid of love is no more capable of understanding a tongue filled with love than a German is capable of understanding a Frenchman. Ein ding sol man wússen: als unglich ist, der ein suͤzes seitenspil selber horti suͤzklich erklingen gegen dem, daz man da von allein hoͤrt sprechen, als ungelich sint dú wort, dú in der lutren gnade werdent enpfangen und usser einem lebenden herzen dur einen lebenden munt us fliezent gegen den selben ⁵⁵ Seuse, Büchlein prologue, DS 197, lines 16–21; Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 208.

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worten, so sú an daz toͮt bermit koment, und sunderliche in tútscher zungen; wan so erkaltent sú neiswe und verblichent als die abgebrochnen roͮsen, wan dú lustlich wise, dú ob allen dingen menschlich herz ruͤret, dú erloͤschet denne, und in der túrri der túrren herzen werdent sú denn enphangen. Ez enwart nie kein seiten so suͤze: der in richtet uf ein túrres schit, er erstumbet. Ein minnerichen zungen ein unminneriches herze enkan als wenig verstan, als ein tútscher einen walhen.⁵⁶

This passage, which echoes with the Pauline contrast between life-giving spirit and annihilating letter (2 Cor 3:6), is dense with analogy, simile, and metaphor.⁵⁷ Through these devices, the author is able to present multiple perspectives on the processes of textual mediation and text-reception; he does this in such a way, moreover, that what appears as difference under one aspect becomes similarity when considered under another. The opening analogy, which brings the act of mediation into focus, insists on the utter difference between experiencing something at first hand and having only the secondary representation of it. To hear the verbal description of an instrument’s playing is nothing like hearing the music itself, to read the textual presentation of words originally received in a state of grace is nothing like the experience of their first inflowing. Difference enters into a play with sameness, however, if the medium too is brought into focus. In the first half of the analogy, both the medium (speech) and what it mediates (music) are acoustic, but the one is verbal, the other nonverbal; in the second half, both the original message and the secondary medium are verbal, but the words spoken to the Dominican were acoustic, whereas their medium is nonacoustic written traces on dead parchment. When the focus shifts one more time, on to the organ which gives resonance and amplification to the message, the emphasis falls on likeness, because the organ passes its qualities on to the signal and its emitter. This likeness is elaborated over the length of the entire passage, both negatively and positively. If the sweet string of a musical instrument is stretched over dry wood, it will give no sound; the words of living grace written in German on dead parchment grow cold and lifeless when they are received in a dry heart; words uttered by a tongue filled with love will not be understood by an unloving heart, just as a Frenchman’s native speech finds no uptake with a German. On the other hand, words of grace flow from a living heart through a living mouth (an allusion to Matthew 12:34: “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh”), and the strings of a sweet instrument play sweet music. Thanks to their equivalence the various terms which stand in for the resonant organ—the wooden frame or body of the instrument, parchment, heart—conflate and confound differences between text and human, author and reader, immediate ⁵⁶ Ibid., DS 199, lines 14–25; trans. Tobin, 209. ⁵⁷ For the Pauline background, see Lentes, “Bildlichkeit,” 40.

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and mediated experience of divine illumination. Dead parchment obviously refers to the material support of the text, a living or loving heart to the disposition of the humans who make and use the text; the wood of the instrument, however, may refer to either, following a tradition of dual symbolism that reaches back to patristic times. According to Augustine, Isidore of Seville, and Hugh of St. Victor, the Holy Scriptures are a harp, their literal and historical meanings are the instrument’s wooden frame, which does not make the music but is necessary for fastening and stretching the strings of the spiritual meanings so that these will sound sweetly in the ears of the player, in other words the reader.⁵⁸ Gregory the Great on the other hand interpreted the harp and its strings as symbols of “right practicing” (recta operatio) and the “bent of those living right” (intentio recte viventium) respectively; the chords must be neither overstretched nor understretched (that is, believers must practice neither too much abstinence nor too little) if they are to play tunefully.⁵⁹ In an extended exegesis, Baldwin of Ford (ca. 1125–1190) equated the harp with harmony between self and others in the monastic community, and another stringed instrument, the psaltery, with concord between self and God; the strings of the harp are the corporeal senses and those of the psaltery the senses of the heart, and all begin to harmonize in obedience and discipline from the dawn of the resurrection.⁶⁰ If the stringed instrument in Seuse’s prologue is a metaphor for human dispositions as well as for divinely worded text, the questions arise: whose dispositions, and which text? The biographical narrative of the Dominican’s previous “hardness” (hertikeit) turning to “loving sweetness” (minneklich suͤzikeit) provides a context for referring the contrast between the soundless string on dry wood and the charming melody of the sweet instrument to the author’s own changing states of spiritual barrenness and fertility; because the text of the Dominican’s contemplations is intended to help others who may be suffering “in hardness [hertikeit] and in bitterness [bitterkeit],” the contrast may however also refer to readerly dispositions: an unreceptive reader is like the dry wood that mutes the string’s vibrations, whereas a receptive one provides the right resonance for the music to sound out sweetly.⁶¹ The instrument is even more polyvalent in its function as a metaphor for divinely originated text. It can mean the scriptures themselves, which triggered the Dominican’s illuminations; or it can mean the discourses of Eternal Wisdom, who speaks from the mouth of scripture; or again it can refer directly to Christ, from whose bloody passion the rose-colored garment of the Büchlein is woven. Hearing the sweet music of the strings is ⁵⁸ Augustine, Contra Faustum Manichaeum 22.94, ed. Zycha, 700–1; Isidore of Seville, Expositio in Vetus Testamentum praefatio, ed. Dulaey and Gorman, 2; Hugh of St. Victor, Didascalicon 5.2, ed. Buttimer, 95–6. ⁵⁹ Gregory the Great, Moralia in Iob 20.41.78, ed. Adriaen, 1061; the text is Jb 30:31: “My harp [cithara] is turned to mourning.” ⁶⁰ Baldwin of Ford, Tractatus de duplici resurrectione, PL 204:434a–435d. His text is Ps 107:3: “Arise, my glory; arise, psaltery and harp.” ⁶¹ Seuse, Büchlein prologue, DS 197, lines 3–8; Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 207.

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accordingly a metaphor that condenses into one activity a number of separate engagements with the divine word in various forms and manifestations: the Dominican author’s contemplations “in the light of the Holy Scriptures,” the receptive reader’s experience of the dialogues with Eternal Wisdom, the clothing (itself a metaphor) of that same reader in the bloody robe of the passion. In all of these engagements, mediation is abolished; the person who is illuminated, who hears the music, or feels the garment’s touch, stands directly in the presence of divinity. The stringed instrument is mentioned again in Chapter 13 (“On the measureless nobility of earthly suffering”) in the same symbolic and narrative constellations that had framed its appearance in the prologue and which moreover reiterate the connection made there between reading with a receptive heart and experiencing the divine in sensory immediateness. Eternal Wisdom introduces a long discourse on suffering with the command: “Hear now the sweet music of the taut strings of the person who suffers for God’s sake, how rich its tone and how sweet its sound.”⁶² The music is both the actual suffering, and the speech in praise of it, which sounds in the servant’s ears as “the sweet playing of the harp” (suͤzes harphen) and the “loving melody of the psaltery” (minneklich psalterjen).⁶³ Eternal Wisdom’s eulogy of suffering culminates in a declaration which extends and modulates the garment metaphor of the prologue. There, the reader spending time with the text of the passion became clothed in a rose-colored garment; here, suffering in imitation of the passion “clothes the soul in a robe of rosy red, in crimson; the soul is crowned with a garland of red roses.”⁶⁴ Both metaphors, the stringed instrument and the robe, create an association of reading, experiencing, and imitating;⁶⁵ the same association is reinforced at the end of the chapter, when the authorial voice intrudes briefly to report another vision which repeats the familiar scenario of inhibition overcome through God’s grace: When the same Dominican had begun to write about suffering, he had a vision, in the same way as is written above, in which the same two women who had previously been suffering and downcast were sitting in front of him. And one of them desired to hear a tune on the psaltery. He took this request unworthily and considered it unspiritual. Then a voice said that her desire to hear the psaltery was not unspiritual. And immediately a youth was there, stringing and

⁶² Ibid. 13, DS 250, lines 20–2: “Nu hoͤre daz suͤz seitenspil der zertenneten seiten eines gotlidenden menschen, wie rilich es doͤnet und wie suͤzklich es erklinget.” Trans. Tobin, 247. ⁶³ Ibid., DS 250, lines 16–18; trans. Tobin, 247. ⁶⁴ Ibid., DS 252, lines 22–4: “Liden kleidet die sele mit roͤslim kleide, mit purpurvar; si treit der roͮten rosen schapel.” Trans. Tobin, 248. ⁶⁵ Cf. Lentes, “Bildlichkeit,” 38, who speaks of “die für Seuse grundlegende Konfiguration von Bildlichkeit, Körperlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit” (the configuration, fundamental for Seuse, of imagicity, corporeality, and writing); “Bildlichkeit” refers not just to the images that accompany Seuse’s text in copies of the “Exemplar,” but to the images and figures of the written text and also to the status of Christ as exemplar in whose image author and reader are to form themselves.

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tuning a psaltery, and when it was ready to play, he placed the two straps crosswise over the strings and handed it to the friar, and the friar began to speak of suffering. Do der selb bredier hate an gevangen von lidenne ze schriben, do waz im vor in der selben wise, als oͮch vor an geschriben stat, wie dú selben zwei menschen, dú in liden und in betruͤbte waren gesin, vor im sessin, und begert ir einú, daz man ir psalterjeti. Das enphieng er unwertlich und meind, es were ungeistlich. Do wart gesprochen, daz ir begirliches psalterjen nit ungeistlich were. Und do zehant was ein jungling da, der bereite uf ein psalteri, und do er si gereiset, do spien er die zwen vedem úber die seiten in krúzwis und gab si dem bruͦder in die hand, und do huͦb er er an ze sprechenne von lidenne.⁶⁶

The playing of the strings, already associated with suffering and with Eternal Wisdom’s words in praise of it, is now also a metaphor for the author’s composition of the dialogue in which Eternal Wisdom delivers the eulogy. And no matter whose point of view is adopted in this nexus of suffering and discourse on suffering, that of the person who suffers, or the person who tells of suffering, or the one who hears or reads about it: all is sweet music. The various associations of the instrument and garment metaphors, both singly and in combination, are fully exploited by the artist of the full-page illustration that accompanies Chapter 13 of the Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit in the oldest surviving manuscript of the “Exemplar” (Strasbourg, Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire, Ms. 2929, ca. 1370, fol. 109v; Fig. 3.1); the picture additionally highlights the correspondence between the workings of a stringed instrument, whose chords and wood convert the player’s touch into audible sounds for the listener, and the simultaneously tactile and acoustic quality of an unmediated sensation of the divine.⁶⁷ The top register translates the textual metaphor of the rose-red garment into a visual scene. It shows Christ on the cross, from which a rose tree sprouts and nearly envelops him and the other figures like a robe; on his

⁶⁶ Seuse, Büchlein 13, DS 253, line 17–254, line 3; Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 249. In the prologue the gender of the two persons dressed in religious habits is not specified, but now they are explicitly female. ⁶⁷ The picture is the last in a cycle of twelve illustrations which has been executed in six of the fifteen extant manuscripts of the “Exemplar” (a seventh has spaces where the pictures were to go), and which is also reproduced in the two prints of 1482 and 1512. Of the twelve pictures, it is the only one to accompany the text of the Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit; all the others are inserted in the text of the Vita; in one manuscript and in the prints the upper part of the twelfth picture has been separated and relocated to the Vita. For descriptions of the cycle and variations in its execution, see Bihlmeyer in the introduction to DS, 45*–55*; Altrock and Ziegeler, “Autorschaft und Medienwandel,” 163–74; Hamburger, “Das Exemplar”; Falque, “Imagery,” 450–2, 490–2. The consensus among scholars since Bihlmeyer has been that the picture cycle was designed by Seuse himself or at least created under his direction, although it cannot be ruled out that the illustrations were added independently of him at an early stage of the manuscript transmission of the “Exemplar.” For discussion of the function of the picture cycle and its relation to the text, see also Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary, chaps. 4 and 5; Lentes, “Bildlichkeit”; Largier, “Der Körper der Schrift.”

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Fig. 3.1 The servant with Christ on the cross. Heinrich Seuse, Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit. Strasbourg, Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire, Ms. 2929 (ca. 1370), fol. 109v. Coll. & photogr. BNU Strasbourg. Cliché CNRS—IRHT.

left is the Christ child, on his right the servant, identified by his Dominican habit with the author; the child throws roses at the servant, speaking the words “I will pick roses and bestow sorrows upon them [i.e. my followers in suffering],” while the author, who wears a garland of roses on his head and holds roses in his hand,

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declares that “Jesus has wounded my heart, placed his sign upon it where my JHS  monogram of the name of Jesus Christ stands”; his chest is bared to reveal the IHC on his heart.⁶⁸ The bottom register depicts the Dominican’s vision of the psaltery. On the left is Christ, standing by the scourging pillar (his inclusion is a pictorial reminiscence of the earlier vision of the prologue, equivalent to the textual reference “as is written above”). His suffering is communicated through touch: in a further reminiscence of the prologue, the Dominican servant touches his hand to Christ’s wounds; it is as though the tactile experience of suffering is transmitted  down his arm and into his heart, where it becomes text in the form of the IHC monogram, before being transferred through the fingers of his other hand to the psaltery, which is handed to him by an angel (not a youth), its straps laid over one another to make a cross; the fingers’ touch is then converted into an acoustic signal, which reaches the two nuns on the servant’s outer left. They are labeled the “two sorrowing individuals,” and listen to the music of the passion with rapt attention. The prologue’s concluding sentences introduce a new metaphor, which rewrites the previously elaborated similarity between message-emitter and resonant organ—soundless chord, dry wood; lifeless words, dead parchment; living mouth, living heart—as a spatial trajectory. The ideal, receptive reader is the one who returns to the place where Eternal Wisdom’s teachings first poured forth: And therefore a zealous person should hasten back to the outpoured wellsprings of these sweet teachings, in order to learn to see them as they were at their source, when they were in their living, rapturous beauty; and that was the inflowing of present grace, in which they might have brought dead souls to life. And, truly, whoever regards them thus will scarcely be able to read this [work] over without feeling an inmost stirring of the heart, either to fervent love or to new light or to wailing for God and loathing of sin, or always to some spiritual desire in which the soul will be renewed in grace. Und dar umbe so sol ein vliziger mensch den usvergangen rúnsen diser suͤzen ler nah ilen, daz er si lerne an sehen nah dem ursprunge, do sú in ir leblichi, in ir wúnklicher schonheit waren; und daz waz der influz gegenwúrtiger gnade, in

⁶⁸ The first caption (“Rosen wil ich brechen vnd vf sú liden trechen”) corresponds to an episode recounted in Vita 34: a pious noblewoman of the author’s acquaintance had a vision of the Christ child in a rose tree, showering roses on the servant seated beneath; when she asked what the roses signified, the child replied (DS 102, lines 24–6): “daz sint dú mengvaltigú liden, dú im got wil zuͦ senden, dú er frúntlich von got sol enphahen und sú gedulteklich liden” (they are the manifold sufferings which God wishes to send to him, and which he should receive from God lovingly and suffer with patience; cf. Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 137). The incident referred to in the second caption (“Jesus min herz verwundet hat, gezeichent da min Jhs stat”) is recounted in Vita 4, DS 15–17; Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 70–1.

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dem si totú herzen moͤhtin han erkicket. Und swer sú also an blicket, der mag eigenlich kumme iemer dis úberlesen, sin herze múze inneklich beweget werden, eintweder ze inbrúnstiger minne oder ze núwem liehte oder jamer nah gotte und missevallen der súnden, oder iemer zuͦ etlicher geistlicher begerunge, in der dú sele denne wurt ernúwret in gnaden.⁶⁹

The metaphor of the wellspring whose waters bring life and light through an increase of divine wisdom is from Sirach 24:40–6: “I, wisdom have poured out rivers. I, like a brook out of a river of a mighty water; I, like a channel of a river, and like an aqueduct, came out of paradise. I said, I will water my garden of plants, and I will water abundantly the fruits of my meadow. And behold my brook came to a great river, and my river came near to a sea. For I make doctrine to shine forth to all as the morning light, and I will declare it far off. I will penetrate to all the lower parts of the earth, and will behold all that sleep, and will enlighten all that hope in the Lord. I will yet pour out doctrine as prophecy.” These verses speak of diffusion, of the movement and spread of the waters over the plains and down to the sea. Seuse however exhorts his readers to follow the watercourse back, so that diffusion becomes its opposite, concentration on and in the source, the place moreover where outflowing becomes inflowing. This movement of concentration and return is derived from Bonaventure’s characterization of God the father as the fontale principium, the “fontal beginning” or “fountainhead” from which everything else proceeds and to which all the perceptible traces of God the father in the created world lead back through God the son.⁷⁰ Recall that the program of the entire Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit is the Augustinian one of following the path from Christ the created and incarnate human to Christ the uncreated divinity.⁷¹ To hear the music of the passion, to wear the robe of Christ’s bloody wounds and feel it next to one’s own skin, to return to the wellspring of Eternal Wisdom: these are metaphors that provide Seuse’s readers with an orientation, by allowing them to form a concrete notion of both the process and the goal. It is a notion moreover that foregrounds the aspect of sensory immediateness in any encounter with divinity and also, with the suggestion that outflowing turns into inflowing, the experience of categorial reversal and confusion.

⁶⁹ Seuse, Büchlein prologue, DS 199, line 25–200, line 9; Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 209. ⁷⁰ Bonaventure, Commentarium in I. Librum Sententiarum distinctio 31, pars 2, dubium 7, Opera omnia 1:552; Itinerarium mentis in Deum 2.7, Opera omnia 5:301, trans. Cousins, 73. The term is also used in a similar way by Aquinas, e.g. Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 26, art. 3, co., Opera omnia 8:211. Seuse, who uses the term fontale principium in Horologium sapientiae 1.11, ed. Künzle, 462, line 22, based his account in Vita 50 (DS 170–5; Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 186–90) on Bonaventure and Aquinas. See Hamburger, “Speculation,” 353–68, 381–2. ⁷¹ See above, 117–18.

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3. The inner senses “Open your inner senses,” Eternal Wisdom bids the servant when introducing the apparition of the unready dying man to him; the Dominican author lamenting his spiritual barrenness to the crucifix experienced “an unusual elevation of his inner senses, and he was suddenly and clearly enlightened.”⁷² The term “inner senses” (MHG inre sinne; Lat. sensus interiores) was current in Seuse’s time in scholastic psychology, where it designated the various faculties of mind which mediate between the empirical senses and the intellect by converting the sensations of the former into intramental representations from which the latter extracts its concepts.⁷³ Seuse’s usage, in the Büchlein and his other vernacular writings, belongs however to a quite separate tradition, descended from Origen, and according to which the inner senses are spiritual analogues of the outer or corporeal senses; to the adept who has trained them they give an unmediated experiential knowledge of God.⁷⁴ Origen developed his theory on the basis of passages in the scriptures where divinity is apparently perceived by one or other of the empirical senses, for example the claim in the first Epistle of John that “We have seen with our eyes, . . . we have looked upon and our hands have handled” the word of life (1:1). Since the corporeal senses perceive only material, transient, and human objects, Origen considered that passages like this one must be referring metaphorically to the spiritual or inner senses, by which the soul knows divinity. This cognition is experiential and nonintellective: Origen translated the Hebrew word da’ath, “knowledge, perception, understanding” in Proverbs 2:5 (“Thou shalt find the knowledge of God”) as aisthēsis, “sensation.”⁷⁵ The inner senses (Origen referred to them variously as the “senses of the soul,” “divine senses,” “senses of the inner man,” “spiritual senses”) are the possession of the spiritually perfect, developed through long apprenticeship in the ascetic, contemplative way of life; even then, they are effective only by divine grace. Each of the inner senses is correlated with a particular biblical metaphor of Christ: the inner sight perceives

⁷² Seuse, Büchlein 21, DS 280, line 4; prologue, DS 196, lines 6–8; Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 269, 207. ⁷³ The vocabulary of the inner senses entered medieval philosophy via its reception of Aristotle and especially Ibn Sina (Avicenna); the classification and number of these “postsensitive” mental faculties was subject to variation. See Wolfson, “Internal Senses”; Hasse, “Faculties”; Heller-Roazen, “Common Sense.” A German sermon attributed to Seuse, but of doubtful authenticity, describes how on the way to perfection the believer must overcome not only the empirical senses but also the inner senses and other faculties of the soul (sermon 3, DS 518–28). ⁷⁴ The following account is based on the fundamental studies by Rahner, “Le début”; “La doctrine.” See also Dictionnaire de spiritualité 14:598–617 and, for recent and suggestive discussion of the theory’s epistemological implications, several essays by Largier, “Inner Senses—Outer Senses”; “Präsenzeffekte”; “Die Applikation der Sinne.” ⁷⁵ The Septuagint and the Vulgate translate da’ath as epignōsis, “recognition, knowledge” and scientia, “knowledge” respectively. Origen cites Prv 2:5 several times, for example Contra Celsum 1.48; 7.34, ed. and trans. Borret, 1:204–5, 4:92–3. For further references, see Rahner, “Le début,” 116.

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the eternal light (Jn 1:5–9), inner hearing the Word (Jn 1:1), taste the bread of life (Jn 6:33), smell ointment and spikenard (Sg 1:3, 12), touch the Word made flesh (Jn 1:14).⁷⁶ Touch assumed a central importance for Bonaventure, the most notable medieval exponent of the Origenist doctrine. According to him, the highest and most perfect degree of contemplation achievable in this life, ecstasy, is experienced as an immediate sensuous contact between God and the soul which takes place “in darkness” (in caligine), in other words without the intellect’s participation, and through which God is “most present to the soul and knowable in himself” (praesentissimus ipsi animae et per se cognoscibilis).⁷⁷ Seuse knew Bonaventure’s writings on the inner senses; an entire passage of his Life, in which he instructs his spiritual daughter Elsbeth Stagel to open the inner ears and eyes of her soul so that she may learn about and perceive God’s being, is taken from the Itinerarium mentis in Deum.⁷⁸ But his understanding of the inner senses was not exclusively in the Origenist tradition; it was also informed by Augustine and Gregory the Great, whose theories of spiritual seeing stand alongside, and intermingle with, what may be an attenuated version of Origen’s doctrine.⁷⁹ Although both theories share the same Neoplatonist background, spiritual seeing—perception by the faculty of the imagination, that is—differs from inner sense experience in that its objects are likenesses of corporeal things and their cognition is, in the last instance, intellective. Seuse reveals his debt to Augustine and Gregory in his characteristic phraseology and terminology, and also through the borrowing of specific narrative motifs and explanatory analogies;⁸⁰ in his vernacular writings, inner sense experience comprises both the ⁷⁶ Origen, Commentarium in Canticum canticorum prologue 2.4–11; 1.4.11; 1.4.16–19; 2.9.12–14, ed. and trans. Brésard et al., 1:92–101, 226–7, 230–3, 442–3. ⁷⁷ Bonaventure, Collationes in Ioannem 1.43, Opera omnia 6:256; cf. Commentarium in II. Librum Sententiarum dist. 23, art. 2, q. 3, conclusio 6, Opera omnia 2:544: “oculi adspectus . . . elevabitur in caliginem”; Quaestiones disputatae de mysterio trinitatis q. 1, art. 1, fund. 10, Opera omnia 5:46. See Rahner, “La doctrine,” 279–91. ⁷⁸ Seuse, Vita 51, DS 176, line 6–180, line 4; Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 190–3. The whole passage is derived from Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis in Deum 1.15, 5.2–6.2, Opera omnia 5:299, 308–11; Journey, trans. Cousins, 67, 94–104. Elsbeth Stagel was a sister in the Dominican convent at Töss, near Winterthur in Switzerland, with whom Seuse had contact from the mid-1330s until her death ca. 1360. Her figure, and the difficulty of getting behind her presence in Seuse’s writings to reach the biographical person, are discussed by Peters, Religiöse Erfahrung, 135–42; VL 9:219–25. ⁷⁹ For Augustine’s theory of spiritual seeing, outlined in his commentary on the Literal Meaning of Genesis, see Chapter 2, 99–101. Gregory repeatedly refers to the “eyes of the heart” or “eyes of the mind” (oculi cordis, oculi mentis) as the organs that perceive God and the last things; cf. Homiliae in Hiezechihelem prophetam 2.1.16, 18, 2.2.14, ed. Adriaen, 220, 223, 234; Moralia in Iob 5.35.64, 31.50.100, ed. Adriaen, 263, 1619; Dialogi 4.5, 7, ed. Moricca, 238, 239. Rahner, “Le début,” 144–5, n. 238, cites a number of passages from both authors where traces of Origen’s teaching—available to them in the Latin translation by Rufinus—may be present; the most notable, because it refers to loving God through all five senses of the “inner person” (interior homo), is Augustine, Confessiones 10.6.8, ed. Verheijen, 158–9. ⁸⁰ Seuse’s frequent use of the privative formula entzogenheit der ussren sinne, “rapture of the exterior senses,” to describe episodes of inner sense experience seems to be modeled on Augustine’s definition of ecstasy as the state in which the mind is carried away from the senses of the body (De Genesi ad litteram 12.12.26, ed. Zycha, 396–7; Literal Meaning of Genesis, trans. Taylor, 2:194–5); the phrase (and variants) is found above all in the Vita. See the glossary to DS, s.vv. entzogenheit; entgangenheit,

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nonintellective sensation of God described by Origen and Bonaventure as well as the imaginative perception of likenesses whose meaning is revealed only after further processing by the intellect.⁸¹ In the prologue to the Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit, Seuse gives a name to the literary form of this second kind of inner sense perception. Just as the dialogues between the servant and Eternal Wisdom did not take place in the body, so too “the visions contained in what follows did not occur in a corporeal manner, but are merely an expounded similitude [usgeleitú bischaft].”⁸² The noun bîschaft, “similitude, parable, example,” establishes that the phenomena referred to in the reports of the servant’s visions are not actual persons and things, available in principle (if not in actuality) to the empirical senses, but linguistic representations whose reality is purely intramental; the qualifier “expounded” makes clear that these likenesses of corporeal sense-objects have been overlaid with interpretation so that Seuse’s readers may understand them all the more readily.⁸³ Yet whether it is a question of pedagogically effective similitude, or the immediate sensation of God, all inner sense experience in the Büchlein has an eschatological focus. The visions, of which the apparition of the unready dying man is merely one, all pertain to death and the other last things; the experimental cognition of divinity is a foretaste of the beatific vision which will be available to God’s elect in heaven, and achieving the foretaste while still in this life involves a virtual dissolution or “death” of the self. To open the inner senses is

“disappearance”; entsunkenheit, “enrapturement”; vergangenheit, “dissolution”—the latter terms variants on the first in the formula. The frequent references throughout Seuse’s vernacular writings to the “eyes of the heart (or spirit, mind, perception)” (oͮgen des herzens, des geistes, des gemútes, der vernunft), to the “spiritual eyes of the soul” (geistliche oͮgen der sele), or the “inner eyes” (inre oͮgen), parallel Gregory’s predilection for the terms oculi cordis or oculi mentis (cf. the preceding note 79). Its source is ultimately biblical: Paul prays for the Christian faithful at Ephesus, requesting that God grant them “the eyes of your heart [oculos cordis] enlightened that you may know what the hope is of his calling and what are the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints” (Eph 1:18). In Vita 38 the authorial voice relates how his “active senses somehow dissolved” (DS 124, lines 22–3: “vergiengen im neiswi die wúrkliche sinne”) and he was transported to the “spiritually perceptible region” (DS 124, line 24: “vernúnftigs land”; cf. Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 153: “realm above the senses”) where he heard a voice reading from Isaiah; the narrative setting alludes to Augustine’s definition of spiritual rapture, in which the soul is entirely removed from the senses of the body to a region where it perceives inner analogues of empirical sense perceptions (De Genesi ad litteram 12.26.53, ed. Zycha, 418–19; Literal Meaning of Genesis, trans. Taylor, 2:216). The analogy of the child raised in complete seclusion from the exterior world, which Seuse deploys in Büchlein 23 to explain that there are things that may be perceived with the the eyes of the soul only, is taken straight out of Gregory the Great, Dialogi 4.1, ed. Moricca, 230. ⁸¹ Cf. Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram 12.8.19–19.20, 12.11.23–4, ed. Zycha, 390–2, 393–5; Literal Meaning of Genesis, trans. Taylor, 2:188–90, 192–3. ⁸² Seuse, Büchlein prologue, DS 197, lines 22–3: “Die gesihte, die hie nach stent, die geschahen oͮch nút in liplicher wise, sú sint allein ein usgeleitú bischaft.” Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 208. ⁸³ On the meaning of usgeleitú bischaft and its equivalent figurata locutio in the Horologium sapientiae, see Haas, “Seuses Visionen,” 202–4; Largier, “Figurata locutio,” 303–15; Falque, “Imagery,” 460–1. Seuse had already used the German term in the Buch der Wahrheit, referring to the presentation of the philosophical arguments in the form of a pedagogical dialogue between Eternal Truth and her disciple (ed. Sturlese/Blumrich, 4, line 55; Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 308).

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therefore always a mode of meditating—in the sense of either remembering or rehearsing—the last end. The servant’s first inner sense experience might be a textbook illustration of what Seuse meant by “expounded similitude.” In Chapter 6 (“How deceptive worldly love is, yet how lovely God”), Eternal Wisdom commands: “Open your inner eyes, and perceive this vision.”⁸⁴ The servant describes what he sees, and also hears: a wretched pilgrim leaning on his staff who has been driven away by the cruel and ferocious inhabitants of a ruined city, and who sighs from the bottom of his heart: “O you kingdoms of heaven and earth, have pity on me, who paid such a bitter price to redeem this city, and am so very ill used here.”⁸⁵ Then each element in the vision is expounded by Eternal Wisdom. The pilgrim is Eternal Wisdom, that is Christ, himself; the staff on which he leans is the cross; the city stands for the contemporary state of the clergy, fallen into corruption and decay, and inhabited by “worldly hearts in spiritual habits”; the tiny number of citizens whose efforts to help the poor pilgrim are hindered by the others are the minority in religious houses who have good intentions, but are corrupted by the bad counsel and example of the majority; “but the piteous cries you heard are the fact that my [i.e. Christ’s] death begins to cry out here, and cries out for ever more on account of those people who are capable of taking neither my bottomless love nor my bitter death sufficiently into their hearts, but instead cast me out and drive me away.”⁸⁶ The pretext for this vision, in which the groans of death encompass the servant for the very first time, was a verse from the Gospel of Matthew: “For many are called, but few are chosen” (22:14); Eternal Wisdom’s citation of it prompted the servant to ask whether the multitude are not chosen because they have abandoned Christ for worldly love, or because Christ has abandoned them.⁸⁷ By presenting the similitude and expounding it, Eternal Wisdom provides the answer: “I am ever ready to help them, if only they were ready for me; I do not forsake them, they forsake me.”⁸⁸ Chapters 10, 11, and 12 (“Why God allows those who love him to suffer temporally”; “Of the everlasting torment of hell”; “Of the immeasurable joy of the heavenly kingdom”) present the servant with inner sense perceptions in ⁸⁴ Seuse, Büchlein 6, DS 216, lines 30–1: “Dez hab uf dinú inren oͮgen, und nim war diser gesiht.” Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 223. ⁸⁵ Ibid., DS 217, lines 16–18: “o himelrich und ertrich, land úch erbarmen, daz ich dis stat so sur han erarnet, und es mir hie als reht úbel wirt erbotten.” Trans. Tobin, 223–4. ⁸⁶ Ibid., DS 218, lines 17–20: “Aber daz ellend ruͤffen, daz du hortest, daz ist, daz min toͮd hie an vahet ze ruͤffenne, und iemer me schriet úber die, da weder min grundlosú minne noh min bitter toͮd so vil vermugen in ir herzen geschaffen, ich werde von in verstossen und vertriben.” Trans. Tobin, 224. ⁸⁷ Ibid., DS 216, lines 26–9; trans. Tobin, 223. ⁸⁸ Ibid., DS 220, lines 30–2: “Ich bin in ze allen ziten bereit ze helfenne, weren echt sú mir bereit; ich gan inen nút ab, sú gant mir ab.” Trans. Tobin, 226. In the Horologium sapientiae the vision (called both similitudo and visio), which the disciple sees in “a kind of spiritual and sweet sleep” (ed. Künzle, 404, lines 10–11: “spirituali quodam ac dulci sopore”), is extended into a long lament on the corruption of monasteries in Seuse’s day; see Haas, “Civitatis ruinae,” 396–400.

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answer to his question: why does God permit those who love him to suffer in this life? Eternal Wisdom argues that by posing such a question, the servant has revealed his lack of horizons. “Unlock your inner senses, open your spiritual eyes, and look. Perceive what you are, where you are, and where you belong. See; thus you will understand that I am most loving in my treatment of those who love me.”⁸⁹ Over the course of the three chapters Eternal Wisdom delivers a survey of the true horizons of human existence, which are God and the last things. Eternal Wisdom’s explanation of the indirect questions “What you are” and “Where you are” consists of definitions and analogies, taken from Augustine and other authorities, which amplify familiar verses of the Bible. “According to your natural being you are a mirror of divinity, an image of the Trinity, an exemplar of eternity”; “you are exiled in a vale of tears, where joy is mingled with sorrow, laughter with tears, mirth with sadness.”⁹⁰ The explanation of “Where the children of the world are”—a question that gets added to Eternal Wisdom’s original list—takes the form of a cautionary vision (“now from the very pit of your heart look upon this piteous lamentation”), which however is realized auditively, as “the song of woe” intoned by the “lovers of this world” who are now paying for their pleasure in hell; the acoustic dimension is emphasized by the fact that the “song” is made up of a sequence of thirteen sentences each beginning with the exclamation “Alas!” (Owe).⁹¹ Finally, the vision of heaven is introduced by the command: “Now raise up your eyes and see where you belong.”⁹² Directing the servant’s gaze in much the same way as Bonaventure did in the Soliloquium, Eternal Wisdom guides him on a contemplative flight over the whole heavenly terrain: “Now come along with me, I will take you there in contemplation, and will let you survey it from afar, in a rough likeness [nach einer groben glichnússe].”⁹³ The servant looks up beyond the nine celestial spheres into the Empyrean, where God and the heavenly beings dwell; he surveys the charming fields and meadows, and inspects the heavenly host round about him, as it drinks from the wellspring ⁸⁹ Seuse, Büchlein 10, DS 237, lines 3–6: “Entschlús din inren sinne, tuͦ uf dinú geistlichen ogen und luͦg, nim eben war, waz du bist, wa du bist und war du hoͤrest; sich, so maht du grifen, daz ich minen vrúnden daz aller minneklichest tuͦn.” Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 238. ⁹⁰ Ibid., DS 237, lines 7–8, 14–15: “Du bist nach dinem naturlichen wesen ein spiegel der gotheit, du bist ein bilde der drivaltkeit und bist ein exemplar der ewikeit. . . . So bist du in dem ellenden jamertal, in dem liep mit leide, lachen mit weinenne, vroͤd mit trurkeit vermischet ist.” Trans. Tobin, 238. Cf. Gn 1:26; Ps 83:7; Augustine, De Trinitate 9.12.18, ed. Mountain and Glorie, 310; Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones de diversis 45.1, SBO 6 pt. 1: 262; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 93, art. 5, Opera omnia 5:405–6. ⁹¹ Seuse, Büchlein 11, DS 237, line 22–239, line 22: “nu luͦg von allem grunde dins herzen den kleglichen jamer. . . . Sich, daz ist der jamersang, der da nach volget dien vrúnden dis zites.” Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 238–40. ⁹² Ibid. 12, DS 240, lines 17–18: “Nu hab oͮch dinú ogen uf und luͦg, war du hoͤrest.” Trans. Tobin, 240. On the epistemology of the vision of heaven, and its background in William of St. Thierry, Aquinas, and Meister Eckhart, see Blumrich, “Die gemeinú ler,” 56–61; Ruh, Geschichte 3:440–1. ⁹³ Seuse, Büchlein 12, DS 241, lines 22–4: “Nu mache dich uf mit mir, ich wil dich da hin vuͤren in betrahtunge, und wil dich einen verren anblik lazen tuͦn nach einer groben glichnússe.” Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 241. On the direction of the gaze in Bonaventure’s Soliloquium, see Chapter 1, 60–5.

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and contemplates in the pure mirror of the unmediated godhead; he looks upon Mary, queen of heaven, who turns her merciful gaze on him; he looks upon the choirs of angels, upon the disciples and lovers of Christ, and upon the martyrs. The vision must however end; in reply to the servant’s ecstatic wish “Let us stay here!” Eternal Wisdom explains: “It is not yet time to stay; you still have many a brave fight to endure. This vision has been shown to you only so that in the midst of all your sufferings you may swiftly turn to it—see, you will never lose heart thus—and forget all your sorrow.”⁹⁴ The “rough likeness” which the servant is shown while still in this life is a passing consolatory intimation of the permanent splendor of the marriage-gift that Christ will give the soul, his bride, in heaven; “that marriage-gift,” says Eternal Wisdom, “is an unobstructed contemplation of that which here you merely believe, an unmediated grasping of that which here you hope for, and a lovingly delightful enjoyment of that which here you love.”⁹⁵ When the day comes, says Eternal Wisdom in the role of Christ, “I will take my beloved bride home to this fatherland in my arms.”⁹⁶ But the servant has already felt his Lord’s embrace in this life. In Chapter 1 (“How some people are drawn by God without their knowledge”), after searching for a long time without knowing what he sought and without ever perceiving it with his corporeal senses, the servant sees Eternal Wisdom with his inner eyes for the first time. The event is framed by a narrative which is based on Augustine’s account in the Confessions of how he came to know and love God. “An errant spirit” (this is how Seuse introduces the character of the servant) “had strayed during his first outing onto the ways of unlikeness,” until Eternal Wisdom encountered him “in a spiritual ineffable form and led him on through ease and hardship to the right path of divine truth.”⁹⁷ Meditating on this miraculous trajectory, he addresses God in words which amplify the Bible verse that stands at the head of the chapter as a motto: “Her have I loved, and have sought her out from my youth, and have ⁹⁴ Seuse, Büchlein 12, DS 246, line 30–247, line 3: “laze úns alhie beliben! . . . Es ist nit hie belibens noch; du muͦst noch mengen kuͤnen strit durbrechen. Dise anblik ist dir allein gezoͤiget, daz du dar einen geswinden ker kunnest tuͦn in allem dinem lidenne,—sih, so kanst du niemer erzagen,—und vergissest alles dines leides.” Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 244. ⁹⁵ Ibid., DS 244, lines 16–19: “Dú morgengabe ist ein offenbares schoͮwen des, daz du hie allein gloͮbest, ein gegenwúrtiges begriffen dez du hie dingest, und ein minneklich lustliches niessen des, daz du hie minnest.” Trans. Tobin, 243. On the epistemology of the “rough likeness,” see Ruh, Geschichte der abendländischen Mystik 3:440–1. ⁹⁶ Seuse, Büchlein 12, DS 244, lines 6–7: “Sihe, in dis vatterlant vuͤre ich ze huse min lieben gemahel under minen armen.” Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 242. ⁹⁷ Ibid. 1, DS 200, lines 20–3: “Es hate sich ein wilder muͦt in sinem ersten usker vergangen in die wege der ungelichheit. Do begegent im in geistlicher unsaglicher bildunge dú Ewig Wisheit und zoh in dur suͤz und sur, unz daz si in brahte uf daz reht pfad der goͤtlichen warheit.” Trans. Tobin, 211 (wege der ungelichheit: “paths of error”). Cf. Confessiones 7.10, ed. Verheijen, 103–4, where Augustine recounts how, while still a Platonist, he was encouraged by his study of philosophy to turn within himself; with the eye of his soul he saw the immutable light of divinity, and this vision made him realize how far away from God he had been “in the region of unlikeness” (in regione dissimilitudinis). The exact Latin phrase is used by Seuse in the equivalent chapter of the Horologium sapientiae: “in regionem dissimilitudinis a statu propriae salutis oberrare vellet” (Horologium 1.1, ed. Künzle, 373, lines 9–10).

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desired to take for my spouse” (Ws 8:2). Since his childhood, the servant reflects, he had desired something, but never understood what it was; he sought it out among the things of creation, but every time the answer came: “This is not what you are searching for”; now his heart is raging with desire to know what it is that stirs in him so mysteriously.⁹⁸ Eternal Wisdom responds: “Do you not recognize it? It has lovingly embraced you and often blocked your path until this moment, when it has won you for itself.”⁹⁹ The servant admits that he has never seen nor heard it, nor does he know what it is, only to be told that the reason was his familiarity with creaturely things and the unfamiliarity of what he was searching for. “But now,” continues Eternal Wisdom, “open your inner eyes and see who I am. It is I, Eternal Wisdom, who have sought you out for myself in eternity with the embrace of my eternal providence.”¹⁰⁰ The servant, who now addresses his interlocutor as “Gentle lovely wisdom,” asks: “Why did you not show yourself to me for so long?”; the answer comes: “If I had done so before, you would not have known my goodness so feelingly [enphintlich].”¹⁰¹ This is the cue for a long confession of love by the servant, which he couples with the request to get to know Eternal Wisdom better, so that his love may be entire.¹⁰² Eternal Wisdom’s words of self-revelation belong to the order of the narrative and simultaneously confound it. They are the culmination of the story of the servant’s quest for the object of his love, but they dissolve the categorial distinctions on which the story’s intelligibility depends. The distinction between desiring subject and desired object, seeker and sought, collapses when the object of the quest declares: “It is I, Eternal Wisdom, who have sought you out for myself.” On the one hand, these words clarify the reference of the pronoun “her” in Wisdom 8:2, the Bible verse that sums up the servant’s life-story so far: the woman he has loved since his youth, whom he has sought out and desired for a spouse reveals herself as Eternal Wisdom. Yet the words are themselves a paraphrase of Wisdom 8:2—but with Eternal Wisdom speaking in the place of the subject who has always loved, sought out, and desired the servant. Not only does the assignment of the roles of narrative subject and object become equivocal at the moment of ⁹⁸ Seuse, Büchlein 1, DS 201, lines 1–18; Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 211–12. The servant’s quest for his love, and the answer that always comes back (“daz ist nit daz, daz du da suͦchest”), are modeled on Confessiones 10.6, ed. Verheijen, 158–60, where Augustine relates that he asked everything in creation—the earth, the sea, the winds and all their inhabitants, the heavens, the sun, the moon and the stars—what God was, only to receive the reply “I am not the God you seek.” ⁹⁹ Seuse, Büchlein 1, DS 201, lines 19–21: “Erkennest du es nit? Es hat dich doch minneklich umbevangen und hat dir den weg dik understanden, unz es dich nu im selber allein hat gewunen.” Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 212. ¹⁰⁰ Ibid., DS 201, lines 25–8: “Aber nu tuͦ uf dinú inren ougen und luͦg, wer ich si. Ich bin es, dú Ewige Wisheit, dú dich in ewikeit ir selber hat uz erwellet mit dem umbvange miner ewigen vúrsichtikeit.” Trans. Tobin, 212. ¹⁰¹ Ibid., DS 202, lines 3–9: “Zartú minnecliche wisheit . . . war umbe erzoͤigtest du dich mir nit nu vil lang? . . . Hetti ich daz do getan, so erkandist du nit als enphintlich min guͦt, als du es sus erkennest.” Trans. Tobin, 212. ¹⁰² Ibid., DS 202, line 10–203, line 3; trans. Tobin, 212–13.

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revelation; in what follows, the gender codings of the story are confused and effaced. Up to now, a grammatically masculine errant spirit and servant (both wilder muͦt and diener are masculine in Middle High German) has been searching for the object of his love; since the name Eternal Wisdom (Ewigú Wisheit) is grammatically feminine, the personification can be introduced as the referent of the feminine accusative pronoun “her” in the Bible verse and accordingly be imagined as the female spouse of the servant’s desire. Yet because of Eternal Wisdom’s association with Christ, “her” character is gendered masculine: in the great confession of his love, the servant addresses the bride he has desired for so long as “beloved lord” (geminter herre).¹⁰³ Finally, the declaration suspends the temporal order of narrative. The servant has been seeking since childhood, but Eternal Wisdom’s seeking knows neither beginning nor end, for “I . . . have sought you out for myself in eternity with the embrace of my eternal providence.” Seeker and sought, lover and beloved, groom and bride, before and after—all these differences are leveled in the moment of revelation which snatches the servant out of the order of narrative and into the ambit of eternal providence. This rapturous experience is, says Eternal Wisdom, enphintlich, “sensible, mediated by the feelings”: a nonintellective, nonrational, and nondiscursive experience of divinity which is felt by the inner senses as the touch of an embrace.¹⁰⁴ Because it falls outside the parameters of lived experience and because it will only be fully realized when God is encountered face to face in the next life, it can be described as a moment of unlived experience.¹⁰⁵ The declaration “It is I, Eternal Wisdom, who have sought you out for myself” produces a comparable moment of unlived experience for Seuse’s readers. The verse from the Book of Wisdom which it paraphrases is the first thing they read after the prologue of the Büchlein, since it stands at the head of the chapter: “Hanc amavi et exquisivi a iuventute mea, et quaesivi mihi sponsam assumere.” The Latin is followed immediately by the author’s translation and commentary: “These ¹⁰³ Ibid., DS 202, line 24; trans. Tobin, 212. The address “lord” is maintained by the servant throughout the dialogues. According to Newman, God and the Goddesses, 206–11, this emphasis on Eternal Wisdom’s masculine gender contrasts with references to the femininity of the “goddess” (dea) Sapientia in the Horologium sapientiae, and may be explained as a reflection of the different audiences for which Seuse was writing, and of his concern to maintain the heteronormativity of his readers’ loving relationship with Christ at all times: the nuns and other religious women who constituted the target readership of the Büchlein required a male love-object, whereas the intended male readers of the Horologium had to be offered a female partner to unite with in spiritual marriage. Cf. Seuse, Horologium sapientiae 1.6, ed. Künzle, 418, line 20. From what we know about the medieval owners of manuscripts of the two works, it is clear that the Büchlein had a considerable uptake among women in the Dominican order, whereas the readership of the Horologium appears to have been overwhelmingly male (Bihlmeyer, introduction to Seuse, DS 11*–17*; Künzle, introduction to Seuse, Horologium sapientiae, 215–19); when it comes to the authorial intentions that may have shaped the gendering of Wisdom’s personification, the picture is less clear, since there are reasons to think that Seuse may have envisaged a mixed readership for the Büchlein; see note 28 to this chapter. ¹⁰⁴ Seuse, Büchlein 1, DS 202, line 9; Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 212. ¹⁰⁵ For the term “unlived experience,” which I have borrowed from Patricia Dailey, see above, 118, with note 31.

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little words are written in the Book of Wisdom, and are said of beautiful all-loving Eternal Wisdom; in German they mean: ‘This one I have loved from my youth and have sought her out to be my spouse.’ ”¹⁰⁶ Seuse’s readers thus already know what the servant has yet to discover: the reference of the feminine accusative pronoun hanc. But this does not mean that over the course of the dialogue which now unfolds the servant merely catches up with the readers’ level of knowledge. The emphasis in the commentary on the written status of the words along with the reference to their translation into German recall the remarks in the prologue (which occur only a couple of paragraphs previously) about words on “dead parchment, especially in the German language.” That is precisely what the readers have before their corporeal eyes as the dialogue of Chapter 1 begins; yet if they thought they knew what it meant their assumptions are shaken as soon as Eternal Wisdom appropriates the verse, for suddenly these become words spoken not about but by that figure. Such a startling change, which reverses the interpretation that has been supplied by the author, will incite the readers to ruminate and meditate on the verse’s meaning; as they do so, pronoun references, genderings, and temporal framings lose their univocity and fixity. To experience such flux is to progress beyond the words on dead parchment, and beyond received interpretations of them; it is to return, for a moment, to the living wellspring.

4. Script, seal, wrap, cast “Write my words into your heart,” says the unready dying man to the servant before going to meet his judge. The metaphor is derived from the Old Testament, where to write God’s commandments on the tablets of the heart means to commit them to memory and above all to shape one’s character and way of life in conformity with their norms.¹⁰⁷ From the earliest Christian times, the scope of the writing was extended to refer to the learning and assimilation of the entire Bible through the typically monastic practices of memorization, rumination, and meditation. Eusebius, for instance, marveled at the piety and the prodigious memory of a blind Egyptian hermit who had “written whole books of the Divine Scriptures, ‘not in tables of stone’ as the divine apostle says, neither on ¹⁰⁶ Seuse, Büchlein 1, DS 200, lines 16–18: “Disú woͤrtli stant geschriben an der wisheit buͦche, und sint gesprochen von der schoͤnen minnerichen Ewigen Wisheit und sprechent ze tútsche also.” Trans. Tobin, 211. ¹⁰⁷ For example Prv 3:3: “Let not mercy and truth leave thee, put them about thy neck, and write them in the tables of thy heart”; 7:2–3: “Keep my commandments, and thou shalt live: and my law as the apple of thy eye. Bind it upon thy fingers, write it upon the tables of thy heart.” God himself is the writer in Jer 31:33: “I will give my law in their bowels, and I will write it in their heart.” The word translated as “table” in Douay-Rheims is Hebrew luwach, “tablet of stone,” Greek platos, “surface,” Latin tabula, “writing tablet.” The Old Testament metaphor is discussed by Jager, Book of the Heart, 10–12.

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skins of animals, nor on paper which moths and time destroy, but truly ‘in fleshy tables of the heart,’ in a transparent soul and most pure eye of the mind, so that whenever he wished he could repeat, as if from a treasury of words, any portion of the Scripture.”¹⁰⁸ Memorizing, ruminating, and meditating on the scripture are exactly what the unready dying man expects the servant to do. Not only does he couple his metaphorical imperative “Write” with the literal command “Meditate on me every day often and thoroughly,” the words he would have the servant inscribe in his heart are derived from the Bible. They are the groans of Psalm 17:5 (“The groans of death encompassed me”) made into articulate speech; by writing them on the tablets of his heart, the servant will not merely remember and reflect upon them, but make them flesh-and-blood habitus. Writing in the heart is a laborious business, palpable and sometimes even painful to the touch. The stern and punitive God of the Old Testament incised the sin of the Israelites in the stone tablet of their hearts with an iron pen with the point of a diamond (Jer 17:1);¹⁰⁹ Jerome admonished new converts to write the scriptures in their hearts, “like children learning their alphabet, cutting the curved letters with a trembling hand in the tablet, and learning by practice to write correctly.”¹¹⁰ For Seuse, the writing is not so much felt as it is seen in the mind’s eye. Preparing to amplify a sequence of Bible verses into a long speech on the nobility of suffering, Eternal Wisdom exhorts the servant: “Write it in the bottom of your heart, and keep it as a sign before the spiritual eyes of your soul.”¹¹¹ The contact senses of touch and also taste are however engaged in two further metaphors that Seuse uses to describe the living presence of divine names in a human heart. These are the metaphors of sealing in wax and founding in metal. They occur in the climax of the dialogue of Chapter 7 of the Büchlein, which deals with the topic “How lovely God is.” In a remarkably rich and complex exchange, ¹⁰⁸ Eusebius, History of the Martyrs in Palestine 13.7–8, Histoire ecclésiastique, ed. Bardy, 3:171–2; Church History, trans. Schaff, 355. The reference to the divine apostle is an allusion to 2 Cor 3:3: “You are the epistle of Christ, ministered by us, and written not with ink, but with the spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in the fleshly tables of the heart.” On this and further examples, from the time of the Church Fathers to the Middle Ages, see Jager, Book of the Heart, 18–20, 44–5, 49–53. ¹⁰⁹ Here too, the Hebrew word is luwach, “tablet of stone”; the Vulgate reads “super latitudinem cordis eorum” (upon the surface of their heart). ¹¹⁰ Jerome, Commentatorium in Abacuc 1.2, ed. Adriaen, 598: “Scribe in corde tuo, et quasi paruuli qui prima elementa accipiunt litterarum, curuos apices et trementem manum in buxo erudiunt, et ad recte scribendum meditatione consuescunt” (commenting on Hb 2:2: “Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables”). For further discussion of the widespread notion that the writing in the heart must be corrected, or even that the writing itself is an act of correction or chastisement, see Jager, Book of the Heart, 20, 54, 59, 129, 130–1. ¹¹¹ Seuse, Büchlein 13, DS 248, lines 12–14: “Sich, von derley liden so hoͤr me, und schrib es in den grunt dins herzen, und hab es ze einem zeichen vor dien geistlichen oͮgen diner sele.” Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 245. The Bible verses are Hos 2:6: “I will hedge up thy way with thorns” (cited DS 248, line 18; trans. Tobin, 245); Mt 20:16: “For many are called but few chosen” (cited DS 248, lines 26–7; trans. Tobin, 246); Ws 11:21: “Thou hast ordered all things in measure” (cited DS 249, line 2; trans. Tobin, 246); Mt 26:42: “My Father, if this chalice may not pass away, but I must drink it, thy will be done” (paraphrased DS 249, lines 18–19; trans. Tobin, 246); Sir 34:9: “What doth he know, that hath not been tried?” (cited DS 252, line 3; trans. Tobin, 248).

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which draws on philosophical, theological, exegetical, and legendary traditions, Eternal Wisdom gives an account of how Christ’s divinity may be touched and tasted through the reception of his names and predicates by the inner senses, a process that is described in metaphors of wrapping and overwrapping in fine garments; the effect of this experience is to make the servant’s soul melt with longing for the impress of his lord’s name sealed upon and cast in golden letters in his heart. Sealing in wax is an old-established philosophical analogy for the manner in which the human senses perceive the external world. According to Aristotle, “sense is that which is receptive of the form of sensible objects without the matter, just as the wax receives the impression of the signet-ring without the iron or the gold.”¹¹² Aristotle was speaking of the corporeal senses, but the analogy was extended to the activity of the inner senses by William of St. Thierry in the early twelfth century and again by Rudolf of Biberach around the turn of the fourteenth. In both authors, the context for the deployment of the analogy is the restoration of the inner senses to their former vigor after human nature had weakened and corrupted them. William gives particular prominence to the sense of taste (sapor), which is specialized in the perception of its etymological cognate wisdom (sapientia) and is assigned a uniquely mediating function in the renovation of all five senses because of its location at the juncture of head and body in the throat.¹¹³ The sense of inner taste is reinvigorated by Christ, the embodiment of divine wisdom, through the medium of the scriptures and the sacraments; a spiritual tasting of God occurs when, in moments of grace, “we begin not only to understand but even somehow, I say, to touch and handle [manu palpare et tractare] the inner meaning of scriptures and the virtue of God’s mysteries and sacraments with the hand of experience.”¹¹⁴ The consequence is that wisdom affixes the “seal of God’s goodness” upon human souls, which are conformed to it until they sing out joyously: “The light of thy countenance, O Lord, is signed upon us: thou hast given gladness in my heart” (Ps 4:7). Like the sensation of tasting, the process of sealing is described by William in metaphors of touch: it “imprints and conforms to itself everything softened within us” (omnia . . . emollita imprimit et conformat) or, in especially hard and obdurate cases, “pounds and crushes” (inculcat et infringit) the soul.¹¹⁵ The identical passage is incorporated by Rudolf into his systematic exposition of the inner senses, which collectively constitute the sixth of ¹¹² Aristotle, On the Soul (De anima) 2.12 [424a], trans. Hett, 136–7. The analogy was transmitted to the medieval West by Augustine, who uses the same analogy to explain how the divine law is copied from the book of truth to human hearts (De Trinitate 14.15.21, ed. Mountain and Glorie, 451). ¹¹³ William of St. Thierry, De natura et dignitate amoris 28–9, ed. Verdeyen, 198–200; Nature and Dignity of Love, trans. Davis, 88–90. On the treatise, which was written ca. 1120 and often attributed to Bernard of Clairvaux, see the introduction by Bell to Davis’s translation. ¹¹⁴ William of St. Thierry, De natura et dignitate amoris 31, ed. Verdeyen, 201; Nature and Dignity of Love, trans. Davis, 91. ¹¹⁵ Ibid.

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seven paths leading the believing soul to God. The inner senses afford the mind an “experiential foretaste and knowledge of things eternal” (aeternorum experimentalis praegustatio et notitia), but the corrupting effects of original sin have made them weak and frail, and human negligence has caused them to slumber. Whereas the second debility may be remedied by putting the exterior senses to sleep through the practice of ascetic discipline, the first may be reversed by Christ alone; to explain how this comes about, Rudolf quotes William on the restorative powers of the scriptures and sacraments.¹¹⁶ In Chapter 7 of the Büchlein, the servant travels along the trajectory laid down by William and Rudolf, starting with the arousal of the inner senses by divine wisdom and ending when wisdom stamps God’s seal upon the believer’s loving heart.¹¹⁷ Meditating on a series of verses from Sirach, “Come over to me, all ye that desire me, and be filled with my fruits” (24:26), “I am the mother of fair love” (24:24), “My spirit is sweet above honey, and my inheritance above honey and the honeycomb” (24:27), “Wine and music rejoice the heart, but the love of wisdom is above them both” (40:20), the servant is filled with longing for his gentle Lord, and begs him to speak “one single little word” (ein einiges woͤrtli) to his soul.¹¹⁸ Eternal Wisdom grants the request by first admonishing the servant to turn away from the corporeal senses and the world they mediate: “Hearken, O daughter, and see, and incline your ears, make a mighty turn within [tuͦ einen kreftigen inker] and forget yourself and all things.”¹¹⁹ The noun înkêr, “inward turn, introversion,” is a keyword of German mysticism; it refers to the act of turning the mind away from exterior sensations, focusing attention within, and losing oneself in the experience of transcendence that will result.¹²⁰ Eternal Wisdom prepares the servant for this inward turn with a lengthy exposition of the epistemological theory on which it is based. Although God transcends human powers of understanding and language, he nonetheless communicates his being to his creatures by putting himself into words whose reference may be perceived by the inner senses:

¹¹⁶ Rudolf of Biberach, De septem itineribus aeternitatis 6 preamble and dist. 3–4, in Bonaventure, Opera omnia 8:464, 465–6. The work, which was composed ca. 1300, is essentially a systematically organized compilation of other authorities and was often thought to be by Bonaventure, hence its inclusion in the Quaracchi edition; it survives in over one hundred manuscripts. See Ruh, Geschichte 3:81. ¹¹⁷ For Seuse’s knowledge of William of St. Thierry, see Blumrich, “Die gemeinú ler,” 62–3. ¹¹⁸ Seuse, Büchlein 7, DS 223, lines 3–19; Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 228. ¹¹⁹ Ibid., DS 223, lines 20–2: “Nu hoͤr, min tohter, und sihe, neige ze mir dinú oren, tuͦ einen kreftigen inker und vergisse din selbes und aller dinge.” Trans. Tobin, 228. The feminine address is explained by the biblical model: “Hearken, O daughter, and see, and incline thy ear: and forget thy people and thy father’s house” (Ps 44:11). ¹²⁰ On the semantics of înkêr and the closely related term înslac, “striking in, impact,” in German mystical writers, see Haas, “Seuse lesen,” 57–63.

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In myself I am the incomprehensible good that always was and ever is, that never was spoken nor ever shall be. I can certainly give myself to the heart for it to sense inwardly, but no tongue can properly express me in words or speak me. And yet, because I, the supernatural and immutable good, give myself to every creature according to its receptiveness toward me, I wrap the sun’s beam in a cloth and give you a spiritual understanding of me and my sweet love in bodily words in the following manner: I place myself tenderly before the eyes of your heart; now adorn and clothe me in spiritual understanding, and deck me out in finery to the fullest extent of your wishes, and endow me with all that is capable of stirring your heart to especial love and desire for me and makes for sheer delight—see, all and all that you and all other humans can possibly imagine by way of shape, elegance, and grace is in me more delightful still than anyone can say. And in words like these I am able to make myself known. Ich bin in mir selben daz unbegriffen guͦt, das ie waz und iemer ist, daz nie gesprochen wart und niemer gesprochen wirt. Ich mag mich wol dem herzen inrlich ze enphinden geben, aber enkein zunge mag mich eigenlich gewoͤrten noh gesprechen. Und doch, wan ich mich, daz úbernatúrliches, unwandelbares guͦt, einer ieklichen kreatur gib nah ir mugentheit in der wise, als si mich enphenklich ist, so bewinde ich der sunnen glast in ein tuͦch und gibe dir geistlichen sin in liplichen worten von mir und miner suͤzen minne also: ich stelle mich zartlich vúr dines herzen oͮgen, nu zier und kleide mich in geistlichem sinne und mache mich vinlich uf nah wunsches gewalt und gib mir alles daz, daz zuͦ sunderlicher minne und liebi und ze ganzem herzluste din herze bewegen kan: sihe, daz ist alles und alles, daz du und ellú menschen koͤndin erdenken von gestalt, von gezierde, von gnaden, in mir noh wúnklicher, denn ez ieman gesprechen muge. Und diserley sint dú wort, in dien ich mich mag ze erkennen geben.¹²¹

The cloth of bodily words in which the incomprehensible good wraps itself is the scriptures and the Word made flesh in Christ. These sensible mediations of suprasensible divinity are outwardly perceptible by the corporeal senses, but their true import may be detected only by the inner senses of the heart. The eyes of the heart do not however unwrap or penetrate the cloth to gaze directly on the sunbeam within. Rather, the process of inward, spiritual sensation is described in terms of further wrapping. The inner senses “adorn,” “clothe,” and “deck out” the cloth in layers of spiritual understanding—metaphors which call to mind the characteristic activity of an orator, who dresses up the content in the ornaments of an elegant style.¹²² And just as rhetorical ornatus and elegantia are pleasing to ¹²¹ Seuse, Büchlein 7, DS 223, line 23–224, line 10; Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 228–9. ¹²² Cicero defines elocutio as the part of oratory responsible for clothing and adorning (“vestire atque ornare”) the conception in elegant words: De oratore 1.31.142, trans. Sutton and Rackham, 1:98–9. Geoffrey of Vinsauf describes the application of poetic ornament as a process of clothing the

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the outward ear, so the adornments of spiritual understanding are delightful to the inner senses of the mind.¹²³ Yet these fine adornments, which consist in every humanly imaginable and utterable predicate in respect of God’s shape, grace, and elegance, are surpassed by God himself, who is “more delightful still.” The comparative, which asserts there is no comparison even as it highlights the equivalence of the terms compared, suggests that all human predicates of God are likenesses that disclose the still greater dissimilarity between the creator and his creatures.¹²⁴ The authority for these epistemological remarks is Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, whose name is given in the marginal glosses of the early manuscripts of the Büchlein.¹²⁵ Pseudo-Dionysius’s writings, known to the Christian West in Latin translations by John Scottus Eriugena and especially John Sarrazin, are the source of the epithets used by Eternal Wisdom to characterize God’s transcendence (his surpassing human speech and knowledge, his supernatural and immutable nature), as well as for the notion that God communicates himself to his creatures, according to their capacity for understanding, as a ray of light which they perceive indirectly.¹²⁶ Pseudo-Dionysius is also the source of the metaphor of wrapping in cloth for the operation of expressing divinity in human language; by giving names to God, he stated, “the Transcendent is clothed in the terms of being, with shape and form on things which have neither.”¹²⁷ The clothing metaphor was developed by Eriugena by way of explicating the relationship between the negative, “apophatic,” and affirmative, “cataphatic,” ways of speaking of God which plays such a central part in Pseudo-Dionysian theology.¹²⁸ There is no contradiction, explains Eriugena, when the theologian asserts that God both is and is not the same predicate, because the positive assertion says merely that God may be called by a certain name, whereas the negation draws our attention to the fact that the same name cannot be a proper signification of divinity, whose nature surpasses human speech and knowledge. Theology “is not unaware that the apophatic way strips [spoliare] divinity of all the significations with which the cataphatic robes matter (res) in a costly garment (pretiosus amictus), and speaks of poetic art as weaving (texere) the ornaments of style (Poetria Nova, lines 761, 962, ed. Gallo, 54, 64). ¹²³ Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 8.3.5, trans. Butler, 3:212–13: ornamented speech (orationis ornatus) captivates the listener with delight (delectatio). ¹²⁴ The formula “between creator and creature there can be noted no similarity so great that a greater dissimiliarity cannot be seen between them” (inter creatorem et creaturam non potest tanta similitudo notari, quin inter eos maior sit dissimilitudo notanda) is from Lateran IV, Canon 2 (Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Tanner, 1:232–3), which condemned heretical doctrines of the Trinity. ¹²⁵ Blumrich, “Die gemeinú ler,” 56–8. ¹²⁶ Cf. Pseudo-Dionysius, De divinibus nominibus 1.1–2, 1.4, 9.8, ed. Suchla, 107–11, 113–15, 212–13; De coelesti hierarchia 1.2, ed. Heil and Ritter, 7–8; Works, trans. Luibheid, 49–50, 52–3, 118, 145–6. ¹²⁷ Pseudo-Dionysius, De divinibus nominibus 1.4, ed. Suchla, 114; Works, trans. Luibhead, 52. The Greek word is perikaluptein, “to cover all round, cloak.” ¹²⁸ For an introduction to this topic, see Corrigan and Harrington, “Pseudo-Dionysius”; Moran, “John Scottus Eriugena.”

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[induit] it. For one way says ‘it is wisdom,’ for instance, robing [induens] it. The other says ‘it is not wisdom,’ disrobing [exuens] it. One then says ‘it can be called this,’ but does not say ‘it is properly this.’ The other says ‘it is not this,’ although it can be called by this predicate.”¹²⁹ Affirmative predications are not a proper signification of God, yet the impropriety must be pertinent if its negation is to yield some genuine intimation of the nature of transcendent divinity.¹³⁰ Restated in Eternal Wisdom’s terminology, the principle means that God will not have succeeded in making himself known to humans unless the predicates in which the spiritual understanding clothes him are fitting “garments.”¹³¹ Their fit is guaranteed by the fact that they have been preselected by Christ himself, who wraps the sunbeam of his beauty in epithets (the “cloth of bodily words”) which the servant’s inner senses perceive and his spiritual understanding predicates of their subject (the action of “clothing” and “decking out”). “I am,” says Eternal Wisdom in the person of Christ, “delightfully adorned with resplendent clothing” and “finely surrounded by every blossoming color of living flowers”; but these ornaments have been chosen so as to fall short of the reality they signify: the cumulative charms of each and every springtime, every heath, and every meadow are merely a “rough thistle” compared with Christ’s true elegance, which exceeds the capacity of any human heart; they are no more capable of touching his beauty than the servant’s little finger may touch the firmament.¹³² “And yet,” Eternal Wisdom adds, “let this composition be made ¹²⁹ Eriugena, Periphyseon 1, ed. Jeauneau, 31, lines 838–43: “Omnibus enim significationibus quas kataphatike diuinitatem induit apophatike eam spoliare non nescit. Vna enim dicit ‘sapientia est’, verbi gratia, eam induens; altera dicit ‘sapientia non est’, eandem exuens. Vna igitur dicit ‘hoc uocari potest’, sed non dicit ‘hoc proprie est’; altera dicit ‘hoc non est’, quamuis ex hoc appellari potest.” In the thirteenth century, this and other excerpts from book 1 of the Periphyseon were integrated into the text of Eriugena’s translation of Pseudo-Dionysius’ treatise on Mystical Theology, in order to provide additional commentary to the Greek scholia translated by Anastasius in the ninth century. See Thirteenth-Century Textbook, ed. Harrington, 80. ¹³⁰ Whereas Eriugena seems to imply that all affirmations apply to God metaphorically, because they involve the transference of creaturely predicates to the creator (Periphyseon 1, ed. Jeauneau, 31, line 833: “per metaphoram a creatura ad creatorem”), Aquinas (Summa Theologiae I, q. 13 art. 3, Opera omnia 4:143–4) would later distinguish between names that apply to God metaphorically (“God is a stone, a lion,” etc.) and names that apply literally (“God is good, wise,” etc.); the former are improper predications, whereas the latter “belong more properly to God than they belong to creatures” with regard to what they signify (res significata), but are improper with regard to their mode of signification (modus significandi), because a predicate such as “good” does not belong to God in its ordinary mode of signification, but “in a more eminent mode” (eminentiori modo). ¹³¹ Cf. Hamburger’s remark that Seuse “artfully combines the cataphatic and apophatic methods, not simply by way of replacing an inferior procedure rooted in sense experience with another capable of overcoming it, but because there is no other way: all knowledge, even knowledge of God, begins by necessity with images” (“Speculation,” 381). Hamburger is referring to the use of imagery, but the statement is equally apt as a characterization of Seuse’s method if we substitute “predications” for “images”: the apophatic way has no other choice than to begin from positive, cataphatic predications of God, and indeed depends on them for its cognitive efficacy. ¹³² Seuse, Büchlein 7, DS 224, lines 21–6, 226, lines 5–8: “Sich, ich bin als wúnklich gezieret mit liehter wat, ich bin so finlich umbgeben mit gebluͤmter missevarw der lebenden bluͦmen, von roͮten roͮsen, wizen lylien, schoͤnen violn und allerley bluͦmen, daz aller meien schoͤne bluͦst, aller liehten owen gruͤnú ris, aller schoͤnen heiden zartú bluͤmli gegen miner gezierde sint als ein ruhe tistel. . . . Nu luͦg, ich

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thus for you, to give a distinction between my sweet love and false transient love.”¹³³ Excited by these adequately inadequate charms of divinity, the servant’s inner senses enjoy a foretaste of that sweet love. Eternal Wisdom ends with a last analogy: “Every sensation of my sweet love that you may experience in time is as a drop in the ocean compared with love in eternity.”¹³⁴ Like the firmament, the ocean connotes something too vast for human heart to comprehend, but at the same time it is subtly different: not infinity beyond finger’s touch, but the whole of which the drop is a palpable, tastable sample. The touch and taste of a single drop are enough to make the servant wish for the impossible, namely to contain Christ within his heart. Reassured that he enjoys his Lord’s undivided love, he launches into a jubilant paean, beginning with the words of the lover in the Song of Solomon: “Anima mea liquefacta est, ut dilectus locutus est” (5:6; My soul melted when my beloved spoke). The speech culminates, after a long celebration of the never-cloying delights of divine love, in a wish that paraphrases another verse from the Song, called up by the association of the melting soul with sealing-wax: “Put me as a seal upon thy heart” (8:6): Ah, Lord, if only I could place your seal upon my heart, if only I could melt you with golden letters into my innermost heart and soul, so that you might never be deleted in me! Owe herr, koͤnd ich dich uf min herz gezeichen, koͤnde ich dich in daz innigoste mins herzen und miner sele mit guldinen buͦchstaben gesmelzen, daz du niemer in mir vertilget wurdist!¹³⁵

In the exegetical tradition the verse was usually construed as an invitation addressed by Christ to the human soul; the action of sealing was interpreted as a metaphor of the process whereby the soul is made Christ-like through

han dir vil worte gegeben, und stan von dien allen in miner minneklichen schonheit als unberuͤret, als daz firmament von dinem minsten vingerlin, wan es oͮge nie gesach noch ore nie gehorte und in kein herze nie komen mohte.” Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 229, 230, is less literal than my translation: “See, I am so delightfully adorned with resplendent clothing, so finely surrounded by every blossoming color of living flowers, by red roses, white lilies, beautiful violas and every kind of flower, that the fair blossom of every Maytime, the green shoots of every resplendent meadow, the delicate little flowers on every beautiful heath are like a rough thistle against my elegance. . . . Now look, I have given you many words, but in my lovely beauty I remain as untouched by all of them as the firmament remains untouched by your smallest finger, for eye never saw it, ear never heard it, and never could it fit in any heart.” ¹³³ Ibid., DS 226, lines 8–10: “Doch so si dir dis entworfen ze einem underscheide miner suͤzen minne und der valschen zerganklichen minne.” Trans. Tobin, 230. ¹³⁴ Ibid., DS 229, lines 7–8: “Alles, daz du oͮch in zit enphinden maht miner suͤzen minne ist als ein troͤphlin gegen dem mer gegen der minne der ewikeit.” Trans. Tobin, 232. Cf. Sir 18:10 “As a drop of water unto the sea . . . so are a thousand years to the days of eternity.” ¹³⁵ Ibid., DS 227, lines 4–5; 228, lines 27–30; trans. Tobin, 230, 231.

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conforming its thoughts and senses to him.¹³⁶ The metaphor’s range of association was therefore similar to that of writing on the tablets of the heart, only the erotic context of the Song foregrounds the loving rather than the corrective aspect of the conformation. Honorius Augustodunensis, for example, expounded the verse in a literal paraphrase: “Put me as a seal upon your heart, that is: imprint the image of me, your lover, in your memory, just as a seal is imprinted in wax and its image is pressed out, so that you may love me just as I have loved you.”¹³⁷ Although he considered the seal to be a signature, Honorius did not specify whether it impressed the letters of the signatory’s name or some kind of pictorial device; Christ’s seal and the signet-rings to which it is compared are said to have an “engraved image” (insculpta imago), which in Christ’s case is his divinity, carved into the signet of his humanity.¹³⁸ Bernard of Clairvaux, on the other hand, was clear that the seal impresses Jesus’s name. In one of his sermons on the Song of Songs, which explains how the name of Jesus is medicine for faithful Christians, he quoted Christ’s invitation to his beloved, and continued: “The name of Jesus furnishes the power to correct your evil actions, to supply what is wanting to imperfect ones; in this name your affections find a guard against corruption, or if corrupted, a power that will make them whole again.”¹³⁹ The name of Jesus spelled out in letters must also be what the servant of Eternal Wisdom wishes to have sealed upon his heart. Not only does he refer to letters in the immediately following variant of his wish, the articulation of the wish is the culmination of a ¹³⁶ The whole of the lover’s invitation of Sg 8:6 reads: “Put me as a seal upon thy heart, as a seal upon thy arm,” and was usually interpreted as a call to conform to Christ in one’s thoughts and senses (whose seat is in the heart) as well as in one’s actions (performed by the arm). Cf. Haimo of Auxerre, Commentarium in Cantica Canticorum, ed. Lähnemann and Rupp, 262–3; Peter Damian, Testimonia de Canticis Canticorum 26, PL 145:1153b–1154c; Peter Damian, letter 66, Briefe, ed. Reindel, 2:255–6; Letters, trans. Blum, 2:47; Honorius Augustodunensis, Expositio in Cantica Canticorum, PL 172:479b–c; Gilbert Foliot, Expositio in Cantica Canticorum, PL 202:1299b–d; Williram of Ebersberg, Expositio in Cantica Canticorum 137, ed. Lähnemann and Rupp, 262–3; St. Trudperter Hohelied 136, line 21–137, line 7, ed. Ohly, 286–8. ¹³⁷ Honorius Augustodunensis, Expositio in Cantica Canticorum, PL 172:479b: “Pone me ut signaculum super cor tuum. Hoc est: Ita imaginem mei, tui amici, imprime memoriae tuae, sicut signaculum cerae imprimitur, ut imago exprimatur, ut me ita diligas sicut ego te dilexi.” ¹³⁸ Ibid. PL 172:479b–c: “Antiqui in annulis vel in armillis lapillos sculptos portabant, quibus litteras amicis missas signabant, inde similitudo iste trahitur. Sigillo est imago insculpta, quae cerae impressae imaginem reddit. Sigillum est Christi humanitas, cui imago insculpta est Christi divinitas, cera vero humana anima, ad imaginem Dei formata.” (The ancients carried about little engraved stones in rings or bracelets, with which they signed the letters they sent to their friends—whence this similitude is taken. Into the signet is engraved an image, which makes the image impressed in wax. The signet is Christ’s humanity, into which the image of Christ’s divinity is engraved, the wax is the human soul, formed in God’s image.) On the whole, the seal itself (as opposed to the act of placing it on the heart) attracts only sparing commentary. Gilbert Foliot referred to it as a memoriale, a “memorial” by which the soul recollects how Christ suffered and died for its sake (Expositio in Cantica Canticorum, PL 202:1299c); Rupert of Deutz compared it to an imperial seal affixed to official documents, authenticating and protecting their contents “like an inviolable seal” (tamquam inuiolabile signaculum) (Commentaria in Canticum Canticorum 7, ed. Haacke, 163, 164). ¹³⁹ Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones super Cantica Canticorum 15.4.7, SBO 1:87: “Habes, inquam, in nomine Iesu, unde actus tuos vel pravos corrigas, vel minus perfectos adimpleas; itemque unde tuos sensus aut serves, ne corrumpantur, aut, si corrumpantur, sanes.” On the Song of Songs, trans. Walsh, 1:111.

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dialogue that began with the servant’s request to have his Lord speak “one single little word” to his soul, so that the name of Jesus sealed and cast in the heart is the triumphant and indelible materialization of this initial wish. The seal is therefore  monogram that the author Seuse, who also styles himself a comparable to the IHC servant of Eternal Wisdom, claims to have literally and indelibly signed with a stylus on the flesh above his heart, fulfilling his own wish “that there should be an eternal love-sign between you [God] and me and as a guarantee, which may never be obliterated by forgetting, that I am yours and you are the eternal love of my heart.”¹⁴⁰ The process of marking the letters of Christ’s name on skin was then repeated by the scribe of the Strasbourg “Exemplar”: in the chapter of Seuse’s  monogram Life that recounts this incident, and elsewhere in the codex, the IHC stands out through being written in red or enlarged initials on the parchment (Strasbourg, Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire, Ms. 2929, fol. 7r; Fig. 3.2).¹⁴¹

 monogram. Heinrich Seuse, Vita. Strasbourg, Bibliothèque Fig. 3.2 The author’s IHC nationale et universitaire, Ms. 2929 (ca. 1370), fol. 7r. Coll. & photogr. BNU Strasbourg. Cliché CNRS—IRHT.

¹⁴⁰ Seuse, Vita 4, DS 16, lines 1–4: “daz ein ewiges minnezeichen weri enzwischen mir und dir ze einem urkúnde, daz ich din und du mins herzen ewigú minne bist, daz kein vergessen niemer me verdilgen moͤhti!” Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 70. The word minnezeichen, “love-sign” is used by Seuse to translate signaculum, “seal,” of Sg 8:6 in Briefbüchlein 11, DS 391, line 19; Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 359. ¹⁴¹ On the various modes of sealing and inscribing the name of Jesus Christ in Seuse’s writings and in manuscripts of the “Exemplar,” see Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary, 263–71; Jager, Book of the Heart, 97–102; Lentes, “Bildlichkeit,” 35–7, 41–5.

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Because the words for seal in the Song of Solomon—Hebrew chotham, Greek sphragis, Latin signaculum—may designate the signet-ring as well as the impression it makes, the biblical metaphor highlights not just the aspect of likeness and conformity in the act of sealing but also the intimacy of touch between the stamp and the wax. In Seuse, the latter aspect is emphasized by the metaphor with which the servant varies his wish to have the name of Jesus sealed upon his heart: “If only I could melt you with golden letters into my innermost heart and soul, so that you might never be deleted in me!” The inspiration for the metal-founding metaphor was a saint’s life in which the letters of Jesus’s name were miraculously present in a human heart. According to the legend of Ignatius of Antioch, who was martyred at Rome in the reign of Trajan, the holy man constantly cried out the name of Jesus to his torturers, claiming he could not do otherwise because it was written in his heart. Once dead, his body was cut open and his heart was found to contain the name in golden letters.¹⁴² Seuse knew the legend, recounting it as the conclusion of a letter probably written to Elsbeth Stagel and other Dominican nuns. The letter begins with the verse “Place me as a seal upon thy heart” as a Latin motto and urges that “Whether we are still or on the move, eating or drinking, the golden  should always be sealed upon our hearts.”¹⁴³ Thus, in the course of the brooch IHS letter the metal of the signet, which touches the heart once only but leaves a lasting mark, changes into the gold of the brooch which permanently touches the heart on which it is sealed; the letters of the brooch upon the heart then change into golden letters inside the heart, where their touch is constantly felt by the inner senses. Through the association of signet, brooch, and letters, the categories of change and permanence, and of outside and inside are confounded. So too is the difference between passive and active, since the brooch may be a golden disk into which the Jesus monogram has been stamped, but also a die that presses permanently on the heart. The same confounding of categories takes place in an even more compact and radical manner when Eternal Wisdom’s servant couples the metaphor of sealing with that of metal-founding. Both processes require a form-giving element that remains stable and continent—the signet in whose sculpted ridges the melting wax will flow; the cast into which the molten metal is poured—and another, formtaking element that undergoes a change of state and whose flux is contained: the wax and the metal, which are made hot and liquid and afterwards become cold and solid again, but in the new form imparted by the signet or cast. The analogy limps, however, as soon as the metaphors are mapped onto their literal referents. In the sealing metaphor, the heart corresponds to the second element, the wax that

¹⁴² James of Voragine, Legenda aurea 36, ed. Maggioni, 233–7. ¹⁴³ Seuse, Briefbüchlein 11, DS 391, line 17, 392, lines 5–7: “Pone me ut signaculum super cor  uf tuum! . . . Wir standen ald wir gangen, wir essen ald trinken, so sol alwent daz guldin fúrspan IHS unser herz gezeichent sin.” Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 359, 360. For Stagel, see note 78 to this chapter.

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is liquid in the seal’s ridges and receives their form; in the founding metaphor, however, it corresponds to the cast that contains the molten gold and shapes it into letters. Moreover, the name of Jesus is permanently engraved in the metal of a signet, but as letters founded in gold it changes state as the metal first heats up and melts then cools and hardens. The product of stating one metaphor in terms of another is therefore a kind of interference between them which complicates the expression of the servant’s desire. What he yearns for is an empirical and logical impossibility: a state in which his heart melts yet remains solid, in which the name is impressed on it from the outside and yet is simultaneously produced and contained on the inside, in which the form his heart receives is also the form it imparts. These paradoxes and alogicalities describe the yearned-for state of a total oneness with God in the intimacy of touching while being touched. For the reader who works through them meditatively, who tries to hold in play all the associations called up by the metaphors, the resulting interference provides a presentiment—a felt experience or, more precisely, a foretouch—of how it will be to have died and be united with Christ forever in heaven.

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4 Rewriting the Text of the Soul In and Around the Devotio Moderna

1. Soul-work and text-work A young man on the brink of renouncing the religious life in order to make his career in the world hears a voice calling him back: “Return, return, O my beloved . . . Place before your eyes and remember your last end.” The offense that he will cause to God if he goes through with his plan; the brevity of this life; the omnipresent threat of death, which may strike at any time; the mercilessness that Christ will show to sinners on judgment day, when it will be too late to repent; the everlasting torments of hell; the severity of the judge and the irrevocability of his sentence—all these things the young man is urged by the voice to consider, so that the fear and trembling they will inspire in him may yet bring him to his senses. “Open your eyes, my beloved. See all this lest you remain in eternal blindness. Learn these things; these things are more necessary for you than any worldly learning.”¹ The young man is evidently in danger of making the same mistake as Heinrich Seuse’s unprepared dying youth, who also neglected to keep his last things at the front of his mind and regretted his negligence only when it was too late.² This particular youngster however was no didactic fiction. His name was Johannes ten Water, the son of a patrician family from Zwolle in the East Central Netherlands, and the voice calling out to him was Geert Grote (1340–1384), the founder of a movement based on personal religious conversion which came to be known as Devotio Moderna (“New” or “Modern-Day Devotion”) and whose adherents were, by the 1380s, beginning to set up communal households in which it was possible to lead a religious life without needing to take monastic vows.³ Johannes ¹ Grote, letter 29, Epistolae, ed. Mulder, 125, 126, 130: “Revertere, revertere, dilecte mi. . . . Habe pre oculis et memorare novissima tua. . . . Aperi, dilecte mi, oculos tuos; vide hec, ne ineternum cecus permaneas. Disce hec; hec tibi necessaria sunt pre omni doctrina mundana.” Devotio Moderna, trans. Van Engen, 79, 80, 82; translation modified to reflect the biblical citations Sg 6:12: “Revertere revertere Sulamitis, revertere revertere ut intueamur te” (Return, return, O Sulamitess: return, return that we may behold thee), and Sir 7:40: “Memorare novissima tua” (Remember thy last end). ² Cf. Seuse, Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit 21, DS 281, line 3–282, line 3; 283, line 20–284, line 2; 284, lines 8–32; Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 270, 271–2; Horologium sapientiae 2.2, ed. Künzle, 529, line 10–530, line 22; 533, line 30–534, line 14; 534, line 33–536, line 15. ³ In terms of medieval estate classification the New Devout were the latest manifestation of a medieval form of life that Kaspar Elm has called “semireligious”: groups positioned between the lay and clerical estates, leading “ruled lives without a rule”; see his essays “Bruderschaft”; “Vita regularis Meditating Death in Medieval and Early Modern Devotional Writing: From Bonaventure to Luther. Mark Chinca, Oxford University Press (2020). © Mark Chinca. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198861980.001.0001

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had become involved with one of these communities while still a schoolboy at Zwolle; in 1382, when the city fathers were encouraging him to think of his career by going away to university in Cologne, Grote composed this appeal to stay true to his first, religious purpose and sent it to him as a letter.⁴ The resemblance between Johannes and the unprepared dying youth is not solely in the eye of the present-day reader who happens to know Seuse. The Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit was a well-known and much read text in New Devout communities, both through the medium of Seuse’s own Latin version of the work, the Horologium sapientiae, as well as through various translations into Dutch.⁵ Grote, who included the Horologium in a list of books he recommended for study and devotion, evidently saw the parallel, because he deliberately borrowed Seuse’s language in order to describe his young protégé’s plight.⁶ In the Horologium, the unprepared dying youth presents himself as a heedless young man whose stubborn procrastination has dragged him into the abyss of death (“in baratrum mortis pertraxisti”);⁷ Grote transferred the metaphor to the situation of Johannes, whom he portrayed as a young man led by the devil to the edge sine regula”; “Devotio moderna.” The most comprehensive study of Devotio Moderna in English is now Van Engen, Sisters and Brothers. With his insistence on understanding the New Devout in the contexts of late medieval religious culture and urban society in the Low Countries, Van Engen avoids the pitfalls of older, still influential treatments of the movement, which either overemphasized its forward-looking nature as a forerunner of Renaissance humanism (Hyma, Christian Renaissance) or, in reaction to that position, sought to deny all connection between the New Devout and the rising trends of Renaissance and Reformation (Post, Modern Devotion). Van Engen further points out that the label devotio moderna, as it was used among fifteenth-century adherents of the movement, articulated a selfunderstanding based on renewing the “ancient” spirituality of the Apostles and Desert Fathers in the present day, rather than a desire to break with the past and with tradition; for this reason, he prefers the translations “Modern-Day Devotion” or “New Devout” to the established but possibly misleading “Modern Devotion” (Sisters and Brothers, 7–10). I have opted for either “New Devout” or the Latin “Devotio Moderna.” ⁴ On the circumstances of the letter’s composition see Devotio Moderna, trans. Van Engen, 40–1; Van Engen, Sisters and Brothers, 46; in the latter he is more guarded about whether Grote’s appeal actually had any effect on Johannes’ eventual decision, taken over twenty years later, in 1403, to join the Augustinian canons at Windesheim. During the fifteenth century many communities of New Devout sought to protect their way of life from suspicion and hostility they encounteed from both lay and ecclesiastical authorities by attaching themselves to religious orders. This attachment could take the form of becoming unprofessed tertiaries of the Franciscan order, or it could involve taking religious vows; the most prominent example of the latter was the congregation of regular canons and canonesses with its mother house at Windesheim. See Van Engen, Sisters and Brothers, 121–5, 154–7; Hendrikman et al., eds., Windesheim. ⁵ On the reception and use of Seuse’s writings among the New Devout, see De Man, “Heinrich Suso”; Wolfs, “Seuse und die Niederlande”; van Aelst, “Suso’s lijdensmeditatie”; Staubach, “Entstehungs- und Rezeptionsbedingungen,” 200–6. On Dutch translations of the whole or parts of the Horologium Sapientiae, see Hoffmann, “Die volkssprachliche Rezeption”; Deschamps, “De Middelnederlandse vertalingen.” ⁶ For Seuse’s influence on Grote, see Epiney-Burgard, Gérard Grote, 86–94. The list has come down to us in a version included by Thomas of Kempen in his Dialogus noviciorum 2.18, Opera omnia 7:97–8; Devotio Moderna, trans. Van Engen, 70–1. The Horologium sapientiae was a staple of numerous Devout reading lists and programs; see Kock, Buchkultur, 127–30, 139, 152. ⁷ Seuse, Horologium sapientiae 2.2, ed. Künzle, 532, lines 7–8: “O cras, cras, quam longam restem fecisti, et in baratrum mortis me procrastinando pertraxisti.” (O tomorrow and tomorrow, how long a rope you have made for me, and dragged me with procrastination into death’s abyss.)

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of a great abyss (“in tantum baratrum deduxisti”).⁸ Moreover, the resemblance was one that Grote wished Johannes to see for himself. In the same letter, he recommended two texts for Johannes to read and use as a resource for remembering his last end. One of these was Vanden kerstenen ghelove (The Christian Faith), an exposition of the Creed by the celebrated Flemish mystic Jan van Ruusbroec (d. 1381) in which the twelfth and last article of faith (“I believe in life everlasting”) is expounded through lengthy descriptions of the life to come, as it will be experienced by sinners in hell on the one hand and by the chosen ones in heaven on the other.⁹ The other assigned reading was the death chapter from the Horologium Sapientiae, which Grote implored Johannes to study especially intensively: “I ask you to turn your eyes a little toward me, and read the chapter in the Horologium of Eternal Wisdom on death and the art of dying. Read it, I ask you, two or three times. Would that you read it through for a month and by the grace of God were restored to health.”¹⁰ Soul-work is performed through text-work: the spiritual goal that Grote sets for Johannes, namely to restore his soul to health by remembering his last end, is to be achieved through an immersive and above all repetitious reading which will afford him an equally immersive and repeated encounter with his own image and likeness in the figure of the unprepared dying youth.¹¹ Such a repetitive reading moreover reproduces in its very structure the most salient trait of Seuse’s writing in the Latin version of the death chapter, which is itself founded on the principle of repetition. Over and over again, the discourse of the chapter recurs to the example of persons who neglected to remember their last end and consequently died unprepared. First, Eternal Wisdom introduces the unprepared dying youth to her disciple as a “palpable example” (exemplum sensibile) of her teaching on death; then the youth highlights his own exemplarity when he admonishes the

⁸ Grote, letter 29, Epistolae, ed. Mulder, 124: “O callide inimice, quanta sunt iacula tua, quanta est tua vehemencia, tu qui tam devotum iuvenem Iohannem nostrum ad tantum baratrum deduxisti.” Devotio Moderna, trans. Van Engen, 78: “O treacherous enemy, how many are your spears, how great your force, that you could lead such a devout young man, our John, into such an abyss.” Van Engen renders baratrum as “whirlpool,” which is appropriate in context (Grote goes on to express his fear that Johannes will be “submerged”); I have kept the more basic meaning of “abyss” to highlight the parallel with Seuse. ⁹ Grote, letter 29, Epistolae, ed. Mulder, 129; Devotio Moderna, trans. Van Engen, 82. The reference is to Ruusbroec, Vanden kerstenen ghelove 2, Opera omnia 10:406–37. Grote visited the elderly Ruusbroec at the community of Augustinian canons at Groenendaal in the late 1370s; on his relationship with him, see Epiney-Burgard, Gérard Grote, 104–41. ¹⁰ Geert Grote, letter 29, Epistolae, ed. Mulder, 127: “Rogo te, gira oculum tuum ad me modicum et lege capitulum de arte moriendi, sive de morte quod habetur in ‘Horologio eterne sapiencie’; lege, rogo, bis vel ter. Utinam velles legere per unum mensem, et per Dei gratiam sanitati restituereris.” Devotio Moderna, trans. Van Engen, 80. ¹¹ In the Latin of the Horologium, the unprepared dying youth is given the names similitudo mortis / hominis morientis, “likeness of death / of a dying man,” and imago mortis, “image of death,” appellations which programmatically declare the figure’s status as similitude and resemblance (Seuse, Horologium sapientiae 2.2, ed. Künzle, 528, lines 3–4; 529, line 10; 534, line 33; 538, line 2; also 528, line 7; 531, line 19; 533, line 30).

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disciple to “place my dismal person, which you see, frequently before your eyes and recall it constantly, and instantly you will perceive how my teaching will be most useful for you”; finally, Eternal Wisdom encourages her disciple to understand the youth’s exemplarity as that of a mere sample, for there are countless others like him: “Lift up your eyes, look around carefully and see how many people there are who, in the blindness of their hearts, close their eyes, lest they see their end, and block their ears, lest they hear and be converted and healed; their perdition will not be long in coming. Consider also the innumerable throng of those who have already been lost on the shoals of an unready death.”¹² We have here a structural homology between the performance of a spiritual exercise and the text that supports it: the exercise consists in the repeated reading of a text whose discourse is founded on repetition. In this particular instance, the homology is post hoc and adventitious; it arises from the fact that Grote happened in this one letter to recommend the iterative mental conjuring of an image and likeness by reading a text that repeatedly foregrounds the exemplarity of the dead and dying. The homology is neither preprogrammed nor necessary, in the sense that Seuse’s text itself mandates the realization of its directions for meditation in a manner that exactly reproduces a constitutive feature of its textuality. Just such a programmatic homology, however, characterizes the five late fourteenth-century regimens of spiritual exercise and meditation that are the focus of this chapter. The regimens in question are: the Libellus (Little book) named for its incipit “Omnes inquit artes” and the Tractatulus devotus (Little treatise for the devout), both by Florens Radewijns (d. 1400), who was the chief organizer of New Devout communities after Grote’s death in 1384;¹³ two manuals of spiritual exercise by Radewijns’s pupil, Gerard Zerbolt van Zutphen (1367–1398), the Tractatus devotus de reformacione virium anime (Devout treatise on the reformation of the powers of the soul) and De spiritualibus ascensionibus (Spiritual Ascents);¹⁴ finally, the Cordiale, seu quatuor novissima (Cordial, or four last things), attributed to Gerard van Vliederhoven (ca. 1340–ca. 1402), a member of the Teutonic Order of

¹² Ibid. 2.2, ed. Künzle, 528, lines 1–2: “sub exemplo sensibili doctrinae huius mysterium tibi tradam”; 535, lines 18–20: “hanc meam, quam vides, tristem personam frequenter oculis tuis obicias et ad memoriam iugiter reducas, et statim senties doctrinam meam tibi fore utilissimam”; 539, lines 22–6: “Leva oculos tuos, circumspice diligenter et vide, quam multi sunt, qui mente excaecati claudunt oculos, ne videant in finem, aggravant aures, ne audiant et convertantur et sanentur; quorum perditio non tardabit. Illorum quoque turbam innumerabilem, quos discrimen mortis indispositae iam perdidit, considera.” This recursion to exemplarity is more muted in the equivalent passages of Seuse’s German: Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit 21, DS 280, lines 2–3 (Eternal Wisdom announces she will show her servant one of the many people who have been betrayed by death); 284, line 19 (the unprepared dying youth urges the servant to contemplate death assiduously); 287, lines 14–16 (Eternal Wisdom encourages the servant to consider how many people have died unprepared in his day and age). Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 269, 272, 274. ¹³ On Radewijns’ life and works, see Mertens, “Florens Radewijns”; Dictionnaire de spiritualité 5:427–34. ¹⁴ Studies of the author and his works are van Rooij, Gerard Zerbolt; Gerrits, Inter timorem et spem.

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Knights.¹⁵ Although not every one of these works was authored by an adherent of the Devotio Moderna, they all emerged from the movement’s heartland in the East Central Netherlands in the latter decades of the fourteenth century: the treatises by Florens Radewijns and Gerard Zerbolt were composed in the Devout men’s house at Deventer in the 1390s; the Cordiale may have been written either during Gerard van Vliederhoven’s time as Commander of the Teutonic Order’s house in Tiel in the Duchy of Guelders (1375–1380), or during his stint as Procurator of its house in Utrecht (1380–1396).¹⁶ Irrespective of their authors’ allegiance, all five works circulated in New Devout communities and networks, and De spiritualibus ascensionibus and the Cordiale especially reached a readership far beyond these.¹⁷ Besides these external commonalities, the five works share the same method: they require their programs of spiritual exercise to be performed in a manner that reproduces a defining feature of their own textuality. With the four Deventer treatises, the feature in question is a compositional one: the practice of excerpting, compiling, and reordering found textual matter so as to make a new text out of it. Florens Radewijns appears to have envisaged users of his handbooks physically excerpting matter from them: he recommends copying down a suitable extract, ruminating on it, and occupying the memory with it; Gerard Zerbolt by contrast apparently intended the elements of his spiritual exercises, indeed the whole plan of the exercises, to be recomposed and reordered primarily in his readers’ hearts and minds rather than on paper. In the case of the Cordiale, the textual feature to be mimicked and repeated—here very definitely in the virtuality of meditation—is

¹⁵ For Gerard van Vliederhoven’s biography and the question of his authorship, see Cordyal, ed. Mulders, xxi–xxvi; De veer utersten, ed. Dusch, 8*–15*; Byrn, “Late Medieval Eschatology,” 58–60. ¹⁶ A colophon to the text of the Cordiale in one manuscript from the beginning of the fifteenth century (Utrecht, Universiteitsbibliotheek, Ms. 318) identifies the author as dominus Gerardus de vliederhoue and describes him as “dispensator dominorum theutonicorum in traiecto” (procurator of the Teutonic Knights in Utrecht). Dusch, introduction to De veer utersten, 8*–15*, and Byrn, “Late Medieval Eschatology,” 61, point out that this may describe the author’s status at the time when the colophon was composed; the work to which it is attached could be earlier. ¹⁷ Three manuscripts of Florens Radwijns’ Libellus are now known, one of them from the Carthusian monastery of Nieuwliecht near Utrecht (further details and bibliography in note 41 to this chapter). Florens’ other treatise, the Tractatulus, has come down to us in one manuscript only, originally from the Devout men’s house in Deventer; it was destroyed in 1940 (Mertens, introduction to Radewijns, Tractatulus devotus, ed. Legrand, 29–33). In the case of the first of Gerard Zerbolt’s two works, De reformacione, forty manuscripts, mainly from Carthusian, Cistercian, and Benedictine houses, and six early printed editions down to 1579 are known (Legrand, introduction to De reformacione edition, 43–59); the other treatise, De spiritualibus ascensionibus, enjoyed a very wide diffusion: 125 manuscripts at the last count, from across the range of monastic orders, and twenty-three prints down to 1677; translations made in the fifteenth century into Dutch and German, which also survived into the print era (Legrand, introduction to De spiritualibus ascensionibus edition, 41–56, 89–91). The Cordiale, seu quatuor novissima, which has been described as “the standard European treatise of the Four Last Things throughout the fifteenth century” (Byrn, “Late Medieval Eschatology,” 55), had a huge dissemination: at least 178 manuscripts, circulating especially in New Devout and Carthusian networks, but also from Dominican, Franciscan and reformed Benedictine houses (Dusch, introduction to De veer utersten, 40*–57*); forty-six printed editions before 1500 (GW 7469–514); early translations into Dutch, Low German, High German, English, French, Catalan, Spanish (for the manuscript transmission, see Dusch, 57*–68*; for incunable prints, GW 7515–41).

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not so much compositional as rhetorical: the rhythm of a discourse that constantly recurs to the same utterances and to the same propositions determines the rhythm of the reader’s own meditations. This reproductive method is an innovation in the history of the textual regimentation of meditation, presenting us for the first time with the phenomenon of abstracted or “ecstatic” form: in the performance of a meditation, the form of the text in use is drawn out of it and made to stand outside it, so to speak, by a reader who transfers that same form to the process of the meditation as well as to the reform of the soul that is the ultimate goal of the exercise. This innovative trait has not been recognized hitherto. Scholarship on the Devotio Moderna in particular has contended that the movement merely integrated pre-existing schemes and methods more systematically than before into the routines of a devout lifestyle.¹⁸ Such a position is understandable, given the propensity of Devotio Moderna writers to recycle familiar epistemologies, schemes, and terminologies: the principal theoretical statement to come out of the movement, Geert Grote’s treatise De quattuor generibus meditabilium (On the Four Classes of Subjects Suitable for Meditation) redeploys Augustine’s account of spiritual and intellectual seeing in order to justify the use of imaginative fictions in meditation;¹⁹ the four Deventer handbooks by Florens Radewijns and Gerard Zerbolt are indebted to Bonaventure for their themes, concepts, and structures.²⁰ Yet, as I hope the following discussion will establish, if we look beyond these obvious features of the works to examine the functioning of their textuality, we discover a radical inventiveness in the authors’ willingness to experiment with the possibilities of performing soul-work through and as text-work. The method relies for its efficacy on the belief that the soul, the object of transformation through spiritual exercise, is itself a text to be worked on. The belief was fostered and sustained by a tradition of metaphorical usage that described the inner person and the life it chooses for itself as a written text or a surface for writing on. A prominent example of such usage is the metaphor of writing on the tables of the heart which, as we saw in the previous chapter, goes back to the Old Testament and refers to the process of conforming the inner person to the dictates of the divine law.²¹ In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, this and other metaphors of written textuality were popular among New Devout authors whenever they were promulgating the movement’s characteristic call to personal conversion and reform. Johan Brinckerink (1359–1419), in an address most likely intended for an audience of Devout canonesses, described the project of turning the individual soul toward God as an ongoing textual process: ¹⁸ van Woerkum, “Methodische meditatie”; Goossens, De meditatie, 204–5; Van Engen, Sisters and Brothers, 298–300. ¹⁹ Grote, De quattuor generibus meditabilium, ed. Tolomio; Devotio Moderna, trans. Van Engen, 98–118. See van Heerwarden, “Grotes traktaat”; Waaijman, “Image and imagelessness.” ²⁰ See below, 166–7, 170–1, 173–4. ²¹ See Chapter 3, 142–3.

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The hearts of the young are like a blank slate, and if they do not write good things there, the devil will write his, such as worldly, carnal, and idle thoughts . . . And if we do not take pains in our youth to inscribe our slate with virtues, inwardness, and good thoughts, we will never come to it in our old age. . . . Therefore we should make a great book out of the virtues and holy exercises from which to read in our old age. We should gather in the book of our heart so many holy exercises and good thoughts that the whole world will seem too small to us. The bigger we make the book, the longer the lesson will be. Want dat herte der ionger is als een tafel die onbescreven is, ende en scriven si daer nu niet guets in, soe scrivet die duvel dat sijn daer in, als werltlike, vleischelike ende ydel ghedachten . . . Ende en pinen wi ons nu niet in onser ioncheit die tafel ons herten te bescriven mit duechden, mit ynnicheit ende mit goeden ghedachten, nymmermeer en comen wi daer toe in onser outheit . . . . Daerom sellen wi nu een groet boec maken mit duechden ende heiliger oefeningen, daer wi in onser outheit uut lesen moghen. Also veel mochten wi nu in onsen boec des herten gaderen heiligher oefeningen ende goeder ghedachten, dat ons alle die werlt te enge worde. Ende hoe wi dat boec meerre maken, hoe dat die lesse langer wort.²²

The business of compiling and disposing the text written in the book of the heart, which Brinckerink dramatizes as a competition with the devil to get the right words set down there, and narrativizes as a work in progress from youth to old age, was also capable of being expressed in another, more compact metaphor. New Devout writers regularly connected the activities of compiling and reading physical text with the project of “putting one’s life in order” (ordinare vitam suam). Florens Radewijns advised that “whoever strives after good things should write down notable sayings on some bit of paper, reflect on them, talk about them, and order his life in accordance with them [vitam suam secundum illa ordinare]”;²³ Thomas of Kempen (1379/80–1471), the most famous of all the authors to emerge from the Devotio Moderna movement, similarly exhorts the convert to ²² Brinckerink, Van de bekeringhe (On conversion), ed. Moll, 111–12; Devotio Moderna, trans. Van Engen, 223. Communities of Devout women often chose to regularize their status by becoming Augustinian canonesses; on the house at Diepenveen, which Brinckerink was instrumental in founding, see Kühler, Johan Brinckerinck. ²³ Radewijns, Verba notabilia, ed. Vregt, 453: “Qui studet bona, debet notare notabiliora super sedulam aliquam, et de illis cogitare et loqui, et vitam suam secundum illa ordinare.” Radewijns was referring to the characteristically New Devout practice, which went back to Grote himself, of compiling a personal list of proposita and notabilia puncta—“resolutions” and “notable points” encapsulating the norms by which the new convert proposed to live—and reading it over regularly in order to make and monitor progress; for this practice, see Staubach, “Pragmatische Schriftlichkeit,” 432–4; Mertens, “Texte,” 71–4; Van Engen, Sisters and Brothers, 140–2. Grote’s own Conclusa et proposita, non vota (Resolutions and Intentions, but not Vows), a set of guidelines for religious living drawn up by him in 1374 or 1375 after his own conversion, survives only as transmitted by Thomas of Kempen in his Dialogus noviciorum 2.18, Opera omnia 7:87–107; Devotio Moderna, trans. Van Engen, 65–75.

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“examine also your notebook frequently, so that your inner progress or failings may become more clearly conspicuous to you . . . It belongs to a wise man to order his life [Sapientis est ordinare vitam suam].”²⁴ The context of writing and reading inevitably evokes the scholastic usage of the words ordinare and ordinatio to designate the ensemble of organizational devices—headings, tables of contents, indices, and so on—that confer order on a written text by making its structure more transparent and hence more easily navigable;²⁵ the effect of that association is to suggest that the inner person or soul, with its moral, perceptual, and intellectual faculties, its passions and its projects, its life trajectory and goals, is susceptible of being organized like a text written in a book. Soul-work is text-work, not just because the transformation of the inner person into a more perfect alignment with God’s will and purpose is stimulated and guided by reading and writing; it is text-work because the soul is perceived as a text, as a product that can be written and rewritten, reformed and corrected, cast in a new and purer order.²⁶

2. Decompose and recompose Text-work of the literal kind played a major part in the process of soul-reform among the New Devout. The movement was notable for cultivating a textcentered piety in which the written word was systematically deployed for purposes ²⁴ Thomas of Kempen, Libellus spiritualis exercitii, Opera omnia 2:332: “Frequenter etiam tuum inspice libellum; ut clarius tibi innotescat internus profectus tuus sive defectus . . . Sapientis est ordinare vitam suam.” The maxim modifies the philosophers’ saying that “it belongs to a wise man to order,” where the context is not however that of putting one’s life in order but the claim of philosophy to a regulative role among the sciences, since it deals in the knowledge of the first causes from which everything else is derived. Cf. Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles 1.1, Opera omnia 13:3: “sapientis est ordinare,” with reference to the principle’s source in Aristotle, Metaphysics 1.2 [982a], trans. Tredennick, 1:10–11: “dein ton sophon epitattein” (the wise man should give orders); also Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 1, art. 6, pr. 1, Opera omnia 4:17. ²⁵ Devices for ordering the contents of books more efficiently emerged from the twelfth century onwards in response to the needs of academic and professional readers trained in the new modes of intellectual inquiry represented by scholasticism; scholastic methods of mise-en-page and book organization were used by the New Devout to structure their own writings. See Parkes, “Ordinatio and Compilatio”; Rouse and Rouse, “Statim invenire”; Staubach, “Das Rapiarium,” 138–41. ²⁶ The attribution to the soul of all the qualities of a text thanks to the application of terminology from the domain of textuality is an outstanding illustration of Goodman’s theory of metaphor. According to him, metaphorical usage has a systemic dimension that goes beyond the atomistic replacement of one term, the literal designation, by another, the metaphor. The literal designation and the metaphor each belong to systems of vocabulary that serve to label particular segments of reality or experience; these terminological schemas, and the organization they create in their respective domains of application, are always also implicated in any single instance of metaphorical usage. The potential of metaphor to stimulate and enhance our cognition accordingly lies not just in the fact that a metaphor prompts us to consider one thing in terms of another, but also and primarily in the fact that it invites us to consider one segment of the world, as it is organized by the vocabulary used to label it, in terms of another; it is through the mapping of non-congruent systems or orders of representation on to one another that the metaphor encourages us to entertain new ways of organizing the metaphorized domain which are not reflected in the literal vocabulary that we have at our disposal for labeling it. See Goodman, Languages of Art, 74, 79–80.

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of examining, disciplining, and fashioning the self.²⁷ Spiritual exercise in general, and remembering the last end in particular, were text-saturated practices by which the inner person was to be remodeled not just through reading, but also through the act of rewriting suitably edifying text. Among the literal reinscription techniques practiced by the Devout were: rewriting the text in the first person singular, so as to internalize and appropriate its message; writing out an amplified version of the text that included the emotional responses it triggered in the reader; excerpting memorable sayings and passages and collecting them in a commonplace book known as rapiarium.²⁸ The habit of keeping such a notebook for private study and reference most likely originated outside the movement, among school and university students; the New Devout however developed the rapiarium into a mode of spiritual exercise through which the character and personality of the notebook-keeper were shaped and molded, not just by the religious content of the texts and sayings chosen for inclusion, but by the very operations involved in making such a collection: selecting and transcribing the excerpts, and putting them in an order. In surviving Devout rapiaria the excerpts have been arranged through the use of text-organizing devices such as rubrics, paragraphs, initials, and marginalia; this, along with the fact that pages have often been left blank for new material to be added, shows that the compilers of these devotional miscellanies regarded them as a work in progress, where each round of reading, excerpting, and ordering afforded another opportunity for meditative immersion in the principles and maxims of Christian living.²⁹ The same compositional processes that created a rapiarium, cannibalizing old text and reconstituting it as new, were instrumental in the production of the most famous and influential of the religious treatises to emerge from the Devotio Moderna, the Imitation of Christ by Thomas of Kempen. The work is a collection of four short tracts of spiritual direction that circulated both separately and ²⁷ On the instrumentalization of the written word in Devotio Moderna programs of self-fashioning and spiritual exercise, see especially Staubach, “Pragmatische Schriftlichkeit,” 428–39; also Van Engen, Sisters and Brothers, 275–8. ²⁸ These modes are discussed and exemplified by Mertens, “Texte.” The derivation of the noun rapiarium is obscure, but late medieval sources connected it with the Latin verb rapere, “to seize, snatch, pluck,” and the related adverb raptim, “by snatching”; it denoted both an object (a book for noting down memorable and useful sayings “plucked” from written texts, and also from oral discourse such as lectures or sermons) as well as a text-type (a collection of excerpts). See Staubach, “Das Rapiarium,” 115–18. ²⁹ Staubach, “Das Rapiarium,” 118–41. He characterizes the New Devout rapiarium as a productive fusion of the principles of monastic meditative lectio on the one hand and scholastic text-organizing ordinatio on the other. He also challenges the hitherto prevalent view that the rapiarium was invented by the New Devout, and that its inner form underwent evolution, from an earlier “successive” or “chronological” type, with excerpts recorded in the order that the compiler happened to come across them, to a later “systematic” or “thematic” type, where the material was arranged according to a plan; in fact, both types co-existed, and both deployed a range of text-structuring devices to organize their contents and make them searchable. For the view that Staubach is striving to revise and correct, see especially Dictionnaire de spiritualité 13:114–19; Mertens, “Lezen met de pen,” 193–5; Mertens, “Modern Devotion,” 236.

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together in almost 800 surviving manuscripts from the fifteenth century and stabilized around the beginning of the print era as the four books of the Imitation as we know it today.³⁰ The basic building material of these tracts is verses excerpted from the Bible, which are sometimes quoted more or less verbatim, at other times paraphrased or alluded to;³¹ this material is grouped into thematically related clusters which the author shaped into statements of instruction and admonition through the addition of surface rhetorical features such as apostrophes and imperatives addressed to the reader. For example, the two chapters devoted to the last things, “Of Meditation upon Death” and “Of Judgment and the Punishments of Sinners,” marshal their citations into a sequence of commonplace themes and arguments: the proximity of death, the futility of living to an advanced age if all it brings is more time for sinning, the overriding necessity of being ready to die at any time, the priority of eternal things over temporal, the inevitability and thoroughness of God’s judgment, and so on;³² these blocks of Bible verses are interspersed with authorial exhortations and appeals which address the message to the reader in the manner of a homily: “Be ready at all times, and so live that death may never find you unprepared. . . . Oh! dearest one! From what great danger you will be able to free yourself, and how great the fear you will be able to escape, if only you will always fear God and be mindful of death! . . . Ah! Foolish one, why do you believe you will live long, when you cannot be certain of a single day?”; “O wretched and foolish sinner, whom the angry man’s countenance fills with dread, how will you answer to God, who knows all your iniquities? . . . What else will that fire consume but your sins? . . . Learn to suffer a little now, so that you may spare yourself worse sufferings then.”³³ The rapiarium-like technique that generated the Imitation also engendered the less well-known handbooks of spiritual exercise compiled by Florens Radewijns and Gerard Zerbolt in the last decade of the fourteenth century in the Devout ³⁰ For the textual history, see Neddermeyer, “Radix Studii”; Neddermeyer, “Verfasser, Verbreitung und Wirkung.” The authorship of the Imitation has been debated and contested since the early seventeenth century, but nowadays the consensus is that Thomas of Kempen was the author or compiler of its constituent tracts. See Becker, Treasure-House, 22–9; Staubach, “Eine unendliche Geschichte?” ³¹ There is also a smaller number of quotations from ecclesiastical and also pagan authors; see the indices in Thomas of Kempen, Imitatio Christi, Opera omnia 2:500–15. The different modes of biblical citation in the Imitation are described by Becker, Treasure-House, 134–68. ³² Thomas of Kempen, Imitatio Christi 1.23–4, Opera omnia 2:44–51; Imitation of Christ, trans. Sherley-Price, 56–61. The Bible verses from which these chapters have been made are identified by Becker, Treasure-House, 342–58. ³³ Thomas of Kempen, Imitatio Christi 1.23–4, Opera omnia 2:44–51: “Semper ergo paratus esto: et taliter vive, ut numquam imparatum mors inveniat . . . Eia carissime, de quanto periculo te poteris liberare, de quam magno timore eripere: si modo semper timoratus fueris et suspectus de morte . . . . Ah stulte quid cogitas te diu victurum, cum nullum diem habeas securum?”; “O miserrime et insipiens peccator, quid respondebis Deo, omnia mala tua scienti [cf. Jb 31:14; 9:2] qui interdum formidas vultum hominis irati? . . . Quid aliud ignis ille devorabit; nisi peccata tua? . . . Disce te nunc in modico pati: ut tunc a gravioribus valeas liberari.” Imitation of Christ, trans. Sherley-Price, 56–61, modified.

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men’s house at Deventer: the Libellus, the Tractatulus devotus, De reformacione virium anime, and De spiritualibus ascensionibus. All four works are, on their most basic compositional level, conglomerates of found textual material that the two authors excerpted from other sources—and also from each other, a circumstance which has resulted in lines of borrowing so tangled as to make it impossible for us now to determine the priority of any one treatise over the other; it is likely that more than one of them was in progress at any given time during the 1390s, with the two authors sharing material and shunting it back and forth between their own writings as well as each other’s.³⁴ What makes this cottage industry of textual recycling so remarkable however is not the fact or the extent or even the multidirectionality of its occurrence; the distinctive and innovative feature is that the authors expected their readers to carry over the processes of textual decomposition and recomposition that were responsible for engendering the text into their routines of spiritual exercise. Radewijns encouraged a style of meditation based on repeated acts of textual decomposition. Both the Libellus and the Tractatulus devotus contain a near identical chapter on reading and study.³⁵ It combines general advice about the purpose of reading (it should not serve the accumulation of knowledge for its own sake but promote the moral transformation of the reader’s character instead) with practical tips on how to study (systematically and at set times) along with a method for reflecting on and internalizing what has been read: A person should also copy down one point that is more completely in keeping with his vocation and ruminate upon it afterwards and occupy his memory with it. Thus Augustine says in his book On True Innocence: “Whoever listens to the word should be like the animals which are called clean on account of the fact that they ruminate, so that he will not disdain to reflect upon the things that he has accepted into the depths of his heart; while he is listening he will resemble those animals as they crush their food by chewing, and when recalling what he has heard he will resemble them as they ruminate.” Unum eciam punctum qui sibi pro suo proposito magis conveniat, homo debet excipere, quem postea ruminet, et memoriam per illum occupet. Unde ³⁴ Radewijns, Libellus, ed. van Woerkum, 1:93, 200–1, 203; Mertens, “Florens Radewijns,” 27; Mertens, preface to Florens Radewijns, Tractatulus, ed. Legrand, 19; Legrand, introduction, appendices, and indices to the same edition, 56–8, 188–91, 205–7; Legrand, introductions and indices to Zerbolt, De reformacione, 87–91, 345–9, and De spiritualibus ascensionibus, 430. ³⁵ Radewijns, Libellus 1.20, “De studio,” ed. van Woerkum, 2:46–8; Radewijns, Tractatulus 7, “De lectione et de sex considerandis circa lectionem,” ed. Legrand, 76–80. Van Woerkum believed that the chapter in the Libellus was taken over from the Tractatulus (Libellus edition, 1:203); it does not however follow that the Tractatulus was necessarily the earlier of the two works (van Woerkum, ed., Libellus 1:179; van Woerkum, “Het Libellus,” 127–8): the modern consensus is that the Libellus was begun first, and that material shared by the treatises could have traveled in either direction if both works were in progress simultaneously (Mertens, preface to Tractatulus, ed. Legrand, 18–19).

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Augustinus in libro De vera innocencia: Auditor verbi similis debet esse animalium, que ob hoc quod ruminant, munda esse dicuntur; ut non pigeat cogitare de hijs que in alveo cordis accepit, ut cum audit sit similis terenti, cum vero audita in memoriam revocat, sit similis ruminanti.³⁶

The operative word in this passage is excipere, which means “to take out, extract,” and by extension “to take down (words, etc., from dictation).”³⁷ It has no equivalent in the text, from the Golden Epistle by William of St. Thierry, that Radewijns is adaptively quoting here and has spliced with words attributed to Augustine. That text reads: “Some part of your daily reading should also each day be committed to memory, taken in as it were into the stomach, to be more carefully digested and brought up again for frequent rumination; something in keeping with your vocation [quod proposito conueniat] and helpful to concentration, something that will take hold of the mind and save it from distraction.”³⁸ By adding the verb excipere, Radewijns evidently wished to encourage a method of self-transformative reading and meditation that depended on physically copying down a personal selection of suitable “points” for retention and further cogitation. The particular materialization of the copying (it might be into the reader’s own rapiarium or, like the list of habitual sins and vices that Radewijns recommended everyone should write down in order to examine them, “on a leaf of paper or writing-tablet”)³⁹ is of less importance than the principle that governs the practice: reading for meditation relies on the decomposition of pre-existing text by making excerpts from it. If Radewijns’s readers applied this principle in their meditative use of his own writings, they would find themselves repeating and prolonging one of the two fundamental procedures by which the text of those same writings had been constituted. The traces of that decompositional procedure are still highly visible in the Libellus. Almost the entire text consists of citations from other texts, assembled ³⁶ Radewijns, Tractatulus 7, ed. Legrand, 78; the almost identical words in Libellus 1.20, ed. van Woerkum, 2:47. The citation attributed to Augustine is actually from the Liber sententiarium, a collection of excerpts from Augustine’s writings made by Prosper of Aquitaine which had the alternative title Liber de vera innocencia; see Prosper, Liber sententiarium 194, ed. Gastaldo, 302–3. The ultimate source of the excerpt is Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos 46.1, ed. Dekkers and Fraipont, 1:529. ³⁷ Oxford Latin Dictionary, s.v. excipio. The derived noun exceptor means “amanuensis” or “copyist” (Oxford Latin Dictionary, s.v.). The classical usage persisted in medieval Latin: see the same headwords in the Mittellateinisches Wörterbuch. ³⁸ William of St. Thierry, Epistola 122, ed. Verdeyen, 253: “Sed de cotidiana lectione aliquid cotidie in uentrem memoriae demittendum est, quod fidelius digeratur, et sursum reuocatum crebrius ruminetur; quod proposito conueniat, quod intentioni proficiat, quod detineat animum, ut aliena cogitare non libeat.” Golden Epistle, trans. Berkeley, 52. ³⁹ Radewijns, Tractatulus 11, ed. Legrand, 86: “Et signare talia [sc. in quibus tunc homo se invenit deliquisse] ad cedulam, vel in tabulam ut eo minus negligat et ut sepius memorie occurrant, et de illis sepius ad minus bis vel ter in die cogitet, et proponat pugnam.” (And note such points [where one finds one has sinned] on a leaf of paper or writing-tablet, so as not to neglect but to remember them more frequently and reflect on them two or three times daily and resolve to fight them.)

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and presented with a minimum of authorial framing: blocks of thematically related excerpts, usually attributed to their source, are introduced by headings, and occasionally subdivided or cross-referenced by marginal glosses and rubrics.⁴⁰ In the versions of the work that are transmitted in two of its three extant manuscripts, these blocks are combined to make two long sequences: the first is concerned with the vices and the means for combating them through a religious life dedicated to the achievement of purity of heart and perfection in the virtues; the second assembles texts for meditation on the life and passion of Christ, the last things, the examination of conscience, and gratitude for God’s beneficence.⁴¹ There is no programmatic statement about the rationale underlying the collection as a whole; our best surmise is that it was intended as a resource-book for private meditations and devotions, and possibly also for public collations: sermon-like addresses of spiritual direction and moral exhortation, which the New Devout delivered to each other as a means of mutual correction, or to interested outsiders in the hope of making new converts.⁴² Occasionally the Libellus gives an indication of the specific use to which a particular block of excerpts may be put. Among the texts collected under the heading “On Death” (De morte), Radewijns includes one by Bonaventure: The prick of conscience against all evil is sharpened in the first place by meditating on the day of one’s death, because it is indeterminate, immutable, and irrevocable. If a person considers the matter diligently, he will labor most

⁴⁰ Scholars have regularly applied the label rapiarium to the Libellus, and it may well be a redacted version of a commonplace book kept by Radewijns; see Libellus, ed. van Woerkum, 1:1–12, 85–90, 199–200; van Woerkum, “Het Libellus,” 123–33; Mertens, “Florens Radewijns,” 28; Mertens, preface to Radewijns, Tractatulus, ed. Legrand, 20; Staubach, “Meditation,” 186. ⁴¹ Summaries of the contents of the Libellus are provided by van Woerkum, “Het Libellus,” 242–6, 249–57; Staubach, “Meditation,” 185–6. The two manuscripts transmitting both sequences are Deventer, Stadsarchief en Athenaeumbibliotheek, 11 L 1 KL, fols. 1r–83v, copied ca. 1400 and bequeathed (perhaps by its owner, named as Willem van Nijmegen) to the New Devout canonesses at Diepenveen, before it passed into the Deventer municipal library at the end of the sixteenth century (see Radewijns, Libellus, ed. van Woerkum, 1:54–73; this manuscript is the base of the edition); Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Ms. 22,937, fols. 35r–135v, colophon dated 1408, most probably copied in Utrecht, with a variant text (Hilg, Handschriften pt. 2:15–18; Hilg catalogued the excerpts, though without identifying them as the Libellus; see Staubach, “Meditation,” 189–90). The third manuscript, Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, Cod. Guelf. 68.15 Aug. 8 , fols. 1–44, fifteenth century, previously belonging to the Utrecht Charterhouse, transmits an abridged version of the Libellus, consisting of the first sequence only (Heinemann, Handschriften 8:140; Radewijns, Libellus, ed. van Woerkum, 1:50–4). ⁴² On the institution of the collation, and on surviving collationalia—anthologies of material for use in these addresses—see Van Engen, Sisters and Brothers, 281–8; Mertens, “Collatio und Codex”; van Beek, Leken trekken. For the suggestion that the Libellus was intended as a resource for collations among other things, see Radewijns, Libellus, ed. van Woerkum, 1:76–84, 199–200; van Woerkum, “Het Libellus,” 118–23, 253–4; there is no contradiction between this theory and the belief that the Libellus developed from a rapiarium kept by Florens, since New Devout rapiaria regularly moved between the personal and communal spheres of application; see Radewijns, Libellus, ed. van Woerkum, 1:87; Staubach “Das Rapiarium,” 141–5.

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diligently while there is still time, so as to be purged of all negligence, concupiscence, and evil. For who will tarry in sin who is uncertain of tomorrow? Exacuitur stimulus consciencie contra omne malum primo in consideracione diei mortis, quoniam est indeterminabilis, immutabilis, irrevocabilis. Quod si diligenter homo inspiciat, diligentissime laborabit, ut dum tempus habet, purgetur ab omni negligencia, concupiscencia, nequicia. Quis enim moraretur in culpa, qui non est certus de die crastina?⁴³

These words are a condensed version of a passage in De triplici via in which Bonaventure explains that the purgative way to spiritual perfection consists in first stirring up, then sharpening, then directing the prick of conscience.⁴⁴ Although the wider systematic context of the three Bonaventuran ways, purgative, illuminative, and unitive, is missing from the Libellus, the citation does make clear that the collection of excerpts on death is to be used so as to bring specific aspects of mortality into focus in meditations that will purge the soul of its inclination to sin.⁴⁵ The fear-inspiring indeterminacy of the hour of death is the theme of the New Testament verses (Mk 13:35: “Watch ye therefore, for you know not when the lord of the house cometh”; Lk 19:43: “The days shall come upon thee, and thy enemies shall cast a trench about thee and compass thee round and straiten thee on every side”) that Radewijns quotes along with associated commentary from Gregory the Great’s gospel homilies;⁴⁶ the immutability of every individual person’s appointment with death is highlighted in an extract from a letter by Peter Damian, which describes how a sinful soul, on the point of parting from the body, “grieves that the immutable moment of strict accounting is unavoidably at hand”;⁴⁷ the irrevocability of death, finally, is thematized in the lament of the unprepared dying youth that Radewijns has excerpted from Seuse’s Horologium sapientiae: “The time has passed by, it has vanished; no one can summon it back.”⁴⁸

⁴³ Radewijns, Libellus 2.28, ed. van Woerkum, 2:125–6. Cf. Bonaventure, De Triplici via 1.7, Opera omnia 8:5; Threefold Way, trans. Etzkorn, 96. In the Deventer manuscript the excerpt concludes the section De morte, whereas in the version of the Nuremberg manuscript it introduces it (fol. 78r; Hilg, Handschriften pt. 2:17). ⁴⁴ Bonaventure, De triplici via 1.3, Opera omnia 8:4; Threefold Way, trans. Etzkorn, 91–2. ⁴⁵ For Bonaventure’s scheme of the three ways, see Chapter 1, 31–2. ⁴⁶ Radewijns, Libellus 2.28, ed. van Woerkum, 2:124–5; the excerpts (Mk 13:35–7; Lk 19:42–4; Gregory the Great, Homiliae in Evangelia 39.4, 39.7–8, 39.8–9, ed. Étaix, 384, 387–8, 389) are also in the version of Nuremberg manuscript, fol. 78v; Hilg, Handschriften pt. 2:17. ⁴⁷ Radewijns, Libellus 2.29, ed. van Woerkum, 2:126: “plorat immobilem districte ulcionis articulum inevitabiliter imminere.” The extract (also in the Nuremberg manuscript, fol. 84r; Hilg, Handschriften pt. 2:18) is Peter Damian, letter 66, Briefe, ed. Reindel, 2:259–60; Letters, trans. Blum, 3:50–2; see Chapter 1, 30. ⁴⁸ Radewijns, Libellus 2.32, ed. van Woerkum, 2:131: “Tempus preterijt, dilapsum est. Revocari a nullo hominum potest.” Cf. Seuse, Horologium sapientiae 2.2, ed. Künzle, 530, lines 19–20. The extract is also in the Nuremberg manuscript, fols. 82r–83v; Hilg, Handschriften pt. 2:17–18.

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Marginal rubrics accompanying the excerpts on the last things help readers of the Libellus to locate and extract a point that meets their needs and inclinations.⁴⁹ An example of such rubrication occurs in the collection of excerpts relating to the last judgment. The set begins with gospel verses on the portents of Doomsday and the separation of the sheep from the goats (Mt 24:27–31; Lk 21:34–36; Mt 25:31–46); next are texts from Gregory the Great, Bernard of Clairvaux, and the Golden Legend of James of Voragine which enlarge upon these themes; then there are two exempla, also excerpted from the Golden Legend, which narrate how Jerome and Bernard of Clairvaux each fell grievously ill and had visions of the last judgment; these stories are followed by extracts from Bonaventure and Pseudo-Bernard about the sufferings of the damned, before the sequence concludes with a long passage from the Book of Wisdom in which the righteous, “who stand with great constancy against those that have afflicted them,” confront the reprobate who, reflecting on the transience and nullity of everything they held dear in this life, are obliged to concede in respect of the righteous that “these are they, whom we had sometime in derision” (Ws 5:1–15).⁵⁰ This mass of textual matter is made navigable and tractable by rubrics in the margin, which enable readers to identify a particular topic or aspect and either copy the associated text down and ruminate on it, in the manner described in the chapter on reading and study, or (in what would be a departure from the author’s recommended practice) simply concentrate their attention on a portion of the text before them and expand its basic proposition into a meditation. For instance, the first set of excerpts from the Golden Legend is indexed by the headings: “Concerning fear; against anger, hardness, liberty and levity of heart” (the corresponding text describes how, at the last judgment, every individual will be confronted by accusers on all sides); “The outward signs of Christ’s passion and his inner virtues will sit in judgment against you” (the accompanying text explains the symbolism of Christ’s cross, nail, and wounds, which will all be exhibited on Doomsday); “The cross and the stripes shall be brighter than the rays of the sun” (the rubric repeats words of John Chrysostom that are cited in the Golden Legend in support of the argument that Christ’s cross and wounds are signs of his glorious victory over death).⁵¹

⁴⁹ The discussion refers to the marginalia to the text of the Deventer manuscript. Van Woerkum, the manuscript’s editor, suggested that they might be authorial (Radewijns, Libellus 1:237), but this question can only be settled after comparison with the as yet unanalyzed marginal and interlinear glosses in the version transmitted by the Nuremberg manuscript. ⁵⁰ Radewijns, Libellus 2.35–8, ed. van Woerkum, 2:135–43. The non-biblical citations are: Gregory the Great, Homiliae in Evangelia 1.6, ed. Étaix, 10; Pseudo-Bernard, Meditationes piissimae 2.4, PL 184:487d–488a; James of Voragine, Legenda aurea 1, 116, 142, ed. Maggioni, 20, 22–3, 818–19, 1003–4; Bonaventure, Lignum vitae 43, Opera omnia 8:84; Pseudo-Bernard, Meditationes piissimae 3.10, PL 184:491d–492b. The Nuremberg manuscript has a variant line-up of texts (fols. 84v–88v; Hilg, Handschriften pt. 2:18). ⁵¹ Radewijns, Libellus 2.35, ed. van Woerkum 2:138, 139: “De timore; contra iram, duriciam, libertatem et levitatem cordis; Signa passionis Christi exteriora et virtutes interiores erunt contra te

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In addition to and mixed in with these analytical rubrics, which segment the text into excerptible points to be pondered and elaborated in meditation, there are still others that could be termed “enargetical” because, like the rhetorical figure enargeia, they help the reader who has either copied out an extract or simply chosen to focus on it to convert the textual inputs into virtual sense experiences that are characterized by their arresting and affecting immediacy. For example, in the section on the last judgment, an excerpt from Gregory’s Gospel Homilies which is itself mainly a quotation from Zephaniah (1:14–16: “The great day of the Lord is near, it is near and exceeding swift: the voice of the day of the Lord is bitter, the mighty man shall there meet with tribulation. That day is a day of wrath, a day of tribulation and distress, a day of calamity and misery, a day of darkness and obscurity, a day of clouds and whirlwinds, a day of the trumpet and alarm”) is accompanied by a marginal rubric which lists the incipits of liturgical chants from the Office of the Dead: the response “Libera me, Domine,” and the versicles “Dies illa,” “Vix iustus salvabitur,” and “Tremens factus sum ego.”⁵² The words of these chants, which would be familiar to readers (not least because Devout brothers were heavily engaged in copying liturgical books for the commercial market),⁵³ repeat and amplify the Bible text’s themes of divine wrath and human tribulation: “Dies illa, dies irae, dies calamitatis et miseriae, dies magna et amara valde” (Zep 1:15; “That day is a day of wrath, a day of calamity and misery, a most great and bitter day”); when the chant in question is enunciated in the first person singular, it additionally stimulates meditative focalization of the scene through the perceptions and above all the emotions of the individual awaiting judgment: “Libera me, Domine, de morte aeterna in die illa tremenda” (Deliver me, O Lord, from everlasting death on that awful day); “Vix justus salvabitur, et ego ubi parebo?” (The righteous person is barely saved, and where shall I be then?); “Tremens factus sum ego et timeo dum discussio venerit atque ventura ira” (I am made to tremble and am afraid, until the judgment shall be upon us and the coming wrath).⁵⁴ Yet it is not only the words of the chants that the rubrics would have called up for readers like a prompt cue, but their melodies too. Playing inside the head like a virtual soundtrack, these melodies would help the meditating reader who has selected the text of Zephaniah’s prophecy not only to visualize, but to hear the last judgment as a scene of shock and awe in which the voice of the day of

in iudicio; Crux et cicatrices radijs solis erunt lucidiores.” The Chrysostom passage quoted by James of Voragine is Homiliae in Matthaeum 3, PG 58:698. ⁵² Radewijns, Libellus 2.35, ed. van Woerkum, 2:137: “Responsorium, Libera me Domine—Dies illa—Vix iustus salvabitur—Tremens factus sum ego.” The text by Gregory that these marginalia accompany is Homiliae in Evangelia 1.6, ed. Étaix, 10. ⁵³ Staubach, “Der Codex als Ware,” 158; Kock, Buchkultur, 120–1. ⁵⁴ For the texts, see Hesbert, Corpus Antiphonalium Officii 4:271, 273, 274 (nos. 7091, 7091G, 7091X, 7091aa).

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the Lord, the raging whirlwind, the trumpet’s blare and the alarm sound out in the mind’s ear.⁵⁵ Much of the material collected in the Libellus also appears in Radewijns’s other treatise, the Tractatulus devotus, but shaped into an explicitly elaborated regimen of spiritual exercise.⁵⁶ The model for this transformation was Bonaventure, who provided Radewijns with the guiding concept for his regimen as well as the structure of its practical realization.⁵⁷ The concept is the ternary series “formed—deformed—reformed”: in the words of Bonaventure’s Soliloquium, the human soul, “formed [formata] by the most high craftsman through nature,” has become “deformed [deformata] by the human will through sin,” but may yet be “reformed [reformata] by God’s goodness through grace.”⁵⁸ Near the beginning of the Tractatulus, Radewijns states that “it is essential to know that the faculties and powers or dispositions of the soul were given to the first human being and ordained as a stimulus to good. . . . But just as, with the fall of the first human being, humankind incurred original sin, so too it incurred the failure and deformation [incurrit destitucionem et deformacionem] of these natural powers and dispositions, so that they now incline and bend toward evil. . . . The heart of a human being consists in these powers and affects, and purgation or purity of heart consists in their purgation or reformation [in harum purgacione et reformacione].”⁵⁹ So far as the process of reform is concerned, Radewijns relies on the Bonaventuran scheme of the three ways: purgative, illuminative, and unitive. After a preliminary discussion in which he defines the ends of religious life as purity of heart and love of God, Radewijns devotes the remainder of the treatise to the practical means and exercises for attaining these goals, arranged in a via purgativa and a via illuminativa respectively (although the latter is only cursorily treated,

⁵⁵ The same technique is used to help readers evoke heaven: in the Deventer manuscript, a long extract from Seuse on the delights of the celestial city, which itself contains liturgical chants from the Dominican Breviary, has a marginal rubric placed at its beginning with the incipits of the following antiphons and hymns: “Lux perpetua lucet”; “In civitate Domini”; “Gaudent in celo”; “Te Deum laudamus.” Radewijns, Libellus, 2.41, ed. van Woerkum 2:146–50, quoting from Horologium sapientiae 1.11, ed. Künzle, 460, line 11–463, line 14; 466, line 4–467, line 25 (with identfication of Seuse’s liturgical allusions). ⁵⁶ On the textual relationship of the Tractatulus to the Libellus, see Legrand’s introduction and appendix to her edition of the former, 56–8, 188–91. ⁵⁷ Staubach, “Meditation,” 186–7. ⁵⁸ These three stages are announced in the course of the first spiritual exercise in Bonaventure’s Soliloquium 1.3, 1.10, 1.29, Opera omnia 8:30, 33, 38: “Quam generose a summo artifice formata sit anima per naturam . . . Quam vitiose a voluntate deformata sit anima per culpam . . . Quam gratiose a divina bonitate reformata sit anima per gratiam.” Trans. Etzkorn, 225, 234, 253. For the scheme, see Chapter 1, 60 with note 157, 63. ⁵⁹ Radewijns, Tractatulus 4, ed. Legrand, 68, 70: “est sciendum quod primo homini potencie et vires vel affectiones anime date erant et ordinate ad bonum. . . . Sed in casu primi hominis sicut humanum genus incurrit culpam originalem, sic eciam harum virium et affectionum naturalium incurrit destitucionem et deformacionem ut sint jam proclive et inclinate ad malum. . . . In hijs viribus et affectionibus cor hominis consistit, et in harum purgacione et reformacione consistit purgacio vel puritas cordis.”

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and it is a matter of conjecture and debate whether Bonaventure’s third way, the via unitiva, features in the program at all).⁶⁰ Within this system, meditation is assigned to the exercises of the purgative way.⁶¹ When it comes to meditation on the last things in particular, Radewijns prefaces the discussion of these topics with the same passage from Bonaventure on sharpening the prick of conscience that accompanies the excerpts “On Death” in the Libellus.⁶² He next specifies the evening, before retiring to bed, as an especially propitious time for “meditating on or reading some or other point relating to death, or Christ’s passion, or hell, etc.,”⁶³ and then goes on to remark that actually every unoccupied moment of the day may be profitably devoted to meditating on some aspect of the last things, and discussing it with other people; after all, reasons Radewijns, is it not the case that Solomon himself said “Remember thy last end, and thou shalt never sin” (Sir 7:40)?⁶⁴ Having laid down the principle that the whole of a person’s waking day ought to be punctuated by meditations and conversations on the last things, Radewijns concludes his introductory discussion by announcing that “in order that everyone may have such meditations to hand, wherever they may be, and not have to rely on books,” he will set forth “several general schemes [generales modi], on the basis of which readers may easily fashion meditations of their own.”⁶⁵ There follow separate plans for meditating

⁶⁰ The transition from the first way to the second occurs very near the end of the Tractatulus, in chap. 50, ed. Legrand, 154: “Secundo loco post viam purgativam sequitur via illuminativa” (Secondly there follows after the purgative way the illuminative way). Mertens and Legrand claim (in the preface and introduction to the edition, 27, 39, 46–7) that the remaining chaps. 51–7 cover the third of the Bonaventuran ways, the via unitiva; the textual evidence however favors the contrary view, put forward by Staubach, “Meditation,” 186–7, 189, that Florens provided only a sketch of the program for the illuminative way and omitted the unitive way entirely. The treatise makes no explicit reference to the via unitiva; the theme of chaps. 51–7, meditation on the passion in order to become mindful of the beneficium of redemption (cf. Tractatulus 51, ed. Legrand, 160), could be considered as a development of the program of the via illuminativa, which had only been introduced in the immediately preceding chapter and is expressly connected with recollection of beneficia received from God (chap. 50, rubric). Moreover, a reduced scheme of two ways corresponds to the two ends of religious devotion, purity of heart and love of God, that were explicitly formulated at the outset of the treatise (chap. 2). ⁶¹ Radewijns, Tractatulus 6, ed. Legrand, 74: “sciendum quod homo in hac via purgativa viciorum potest se tripliciter exercere secundum Bonaventuram in Parvo bono, scilicet: legendo, meditando et orando” (it is essential to know that in this way of purgation of the vices one may make one’s exercises in three ways, following Bonaventure in his Parvum bonum, namely by reading, meditation, and prayer). The reference is to Bonaventure, De triplici via (sometimes known by the alternative title Parvum bonum), prologus 1, Opera omnia 8:3; Threefold Way, trans. Etzkorn, 90. ⁶² Radewijns, Tractatulus 13, ed. Legrand, 90. In this case, the quotation stays closer to the text of Bonaventure; cf. above, 166–7. ⁶³ Radewijns, Tractatulus 14, ed. Legrand, 90. Meditation is recommended for this time of day because, the text continues, it will ensure that one’s dreams are purer than they might otherwise be, and continue to influence one’s thoughts on waking. ⁶⁴ Ibid. 15, ed. Legrand, 92. ⁶⁵ Ibid. 16, ed. Legrand, 94: “Ut autem homo meditaciones tales ubicumque fuerit, in promptu habeat, nec semper indigeat subsidio librorum, possunt aliqui generales modi talium meditacionum poni, secundum quos homo leviter possit formare.”

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on each of the last things: death, the punishments of hell, the last judgment, and the joys of heaven.⁶⁶ These plans are lists of brief points which read like analytical resumés of the texts brought together under the equivalent headings of the Libellus. For example, among the texts on the last judgment in the Libellus there is an excerpt from the Golden Legend which evokes the terrifying situation of the sinner with no place to hide: “O how narrow the ways of the reprobate will be: above him will be the wrathful judge, beneath him horrible chaos . . . ”; the first point of the “General Scheme for Reflecting on the Last Judgment” in the Tractatulus presents only the theme without the concrete details of space experienced as constriction: “Concerning the insufferable wrath of the judge who will take by surprise all who have offended against him.”⁶⁷ The scheme continues with seven further points introduced either by the preposition de, “concerning,” or by a determiner such as quomodo, “how”; they all correspond to one or other excerpt in the Libellus of which they are the thematic distillation: “How the devil will accuse us, presenting in evidence every wicked thing we have done and every good thing we have left undone, the time and the place etc., and our own iniquity and the whole world shall bear witness against us”;⁶⁸ “How the signs of the Lord’s passion will be presented in evidence against us, and how Christ will reproach us for scorning and despising them”;⁶⁹ “How the righteous then will hold their heads high and stand in great constancy; and the wicked shall say: ‘These are they, whom we had sometime in derision’ ”;⁷⁰ “Concerning that terrible thunder and ⁶⁶ Ibid. 16–19, ed. Legrand, 94–102. ⁶⁷ Ibid. 18, ed. Legrand, 100: “De intollerabili ira iudicis supervenientis contra omnes, qui eum offenderunt.” Cf. Radewijns, Libellus 2.35, ed. van Woerkum, 2:138: “O quam anguste erunt vie reprobris: superius erit iudex iratus, inferius horrendum chaos”; citation from James of Voragine, Legenda aurea 1, ed. Maggioni, 23. ⁶⁸ Radewijns, Tractatulus 18, ed. Legrand, 100: “Quomodo accusabit nos diabolus ostendens omnia mala comissa et bona dimissa, tempus et locum, etc. et proprium scelus et totus mundus dabit contra nos testimonium.” Cf. Radewijns, Libellus 2.35, ed. van Woerkum, 2:137–8: “Presto tunc erit dyabolus, recitans verba professionis nostre, et obiciens nobis quecumque, et in quo loco et in qua hora peccavimus, et quid boni tunc temporis facere debuimus. . . . Secundus accusator erit proprium scelus. . . . Tercius accusator erit totus mundus”; citation from James of Voragine, Legenda aurea 1, ed. Maggioni, 21–2. ⁶⁹ Radewijns, Tractatulus 18, ed. Legrand 100: “Quomodo contra nos insignia dominice passionis ostendentur, et quomodo per illa exprobrabit Christus, quia sprevimus et contempsimus ea.” Cf. Radewijns, Libellus 2.35, ed. van Woerkum, 2:139: “Hec enim signa passionis in iudicio erunt . . . ex hoc ostendatur, quam iustissime reprobi sunt dampnati, quod sclt. tantum precium sui sanguinis contempserunt. Unde in hec verba eis exprobrabit, ut dicit Crisostomus: ‘Ego propter vos factus sum homo, propter vos alligatus et delusus sum, et cesus sum, et crucifixus sum’ ”; citation from James of Voragine, Legenda aurea 1, ed. Maggioni, 20, in its turn citing John Chrysostom, Opus imperfectum in Matthaeum 49, PG 56:919. ⁷⁰ Radewijns, Tractatulus 18, ed. Legrand, 100: “Quomodo tunc iusti levabunt capita et stabunt in magna constancia. Et mali dicunt: Hi sunt, quos aliquando, etc.” Cf. Radewijns, Libellus 2.38, ed. van Woerkum, 2:142–3: “Tunc stabunt iusti in magna constancia adversus eos qui se angustiaverunt, et qui abstulerunt labores eorum. Videntes turbabuntur timore horribili, et mirabuntur in subitacione insperate salutis; dicentes intra se, penitenciam agentes, et pre angustia spiritus gementes: Hij sunt quos habuimus aliquando in derisum [Ws 5:1–3].”

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irrevocable sentence passed on the wicked: ‘Depart, you cursed, into everlasting fire’ ”;⁷¹ “Also concerning the chastisement of the wicked for failing to perform the works of mercy”;⁷² “How sweetly Christ’s words will be to the just because they did perform the works of mercy”;⁷³ “Also how, after this, there will be two places, far apart and separated by an abyss so that they may never be joined together in all eternity.”⁷⁴ Presented with such a menu of topics (for that is what Radewijns’s meditation plans are), the reader can easily apply the author’s advice concerning reading and meditation in general and “copy down one point” that especially appeals “and ruminate upon it afterwards and occupy the memory with it.” The same practice of excerpting suitable points for memorization and meditation is advocated by Gerard Zerbolt of Zutphen.⁷⁵ In his treatises, however, it is not the text-decomposing procedure of the excerpting author that provides readers with a principle of reception and application, but the recompositional strategies of the writer who imposes order and coherence on the excerpted materials. Both De reformacione and De spiritualibus ascensionibus are tightly structured wholes whose concept and program are elaborated with a far higher degree of stringency and consistency than in Radewijns’s Tractatulus where, as we have seen, the scheme of the two (or maybe three) ways is at best unevenly executed.⁷⁶ As with the Tractatulus, the guiding concept for Zerbolt’s treatises is

⁷¹ Radewijns, Tractatulus 18, ed. Legrand, 100: “De illo horribili tonitruo et irrevocabili sentencia contra malos.” Cf. Radewijns, Libellus 2.35, ed. van Woerkum 2:136: “Discedite a me, maledicti, in ignem eternum [Mt 25:41].” ⁷² Radewijns, Tractatulus 18, ed. Legrand, 100: “Item de exprobracione malorum, quia opera misericordie non exercuerunt.” Cf. Radewijns, Libellus 2.35, ed. van Woerkum, 2:137, quoting Mt 25:42–3, in which Christ chastises the damned for their failure to perform these works. ⁷³ Radewijns, Tractatulus 18, ed. Legrand, 100: “Quam dulciter Christus loquitur iustis, quia opera misericordie fecerunt.” Cf. Radewijns, Libellus 2.35, ed. van Woerkum, 2:136, quoting Christ’s words to the elect in Mt 25:35–6. ⁷⁴ Radewijns, Tractatulus 18, ed. Legrand, 102: “Item quomodo post hoc erunt duo loca procul a se invicem per chaos interpositum, in eternum non coniungenda.” This topography of the afterlife is extrapolated from Mt 25:46, quoted in Libellus 2.35, ed. van Woerkum 2:137, which states that the damned “shall go into everlasting punishment” and the just “into life everlasting.” ⁷⁵ Zerbolt, De reformacione 15, ed. Legrand, 144: “semper ex lectione aliquid debes extrahere, quod tuo proposito conveniat, quod te ad puritatem cordis ammoneat, quodque ruminans utiliter memoriam occupes ad hoc, si aliud non habueris salubrius pro reformacione et occupacione memorie recurrendo.” (You should always copy something down from your reading which is appropriate to your purpose, will spur you on to achieve purity of heart, and with which you may usefully occupy your memory in ruminating, if you have nothing more salutary to rely on for reforming and occupying your memory.) There follows the excerpt from Augustine on rumination that Radewijns cited in the Libellus and Tractatulus devotus (see above, 164–5). An abbreviated version of the same advice appears in Zerbolt, De spiritualibus ascensionibus 44, ed. Legrand, 282: “Debes igitur ut immediacius lectionem ad puritatem referas, semper aliquid de lectione extrahere quod tuo proposito conveniat, quod memoriam occupet, quod te ad proficiendum admoneat ut sis animal mundum quod consuevit ruminare.” Devotio Moderna, trans. Van Engen, 288: “That you might refer your reading directly to purity, always extract something from it appropriate to your purpose which may fill your memory and spur your progress, like a clean animal chewing its cud.” The verb extrahere, which Zerbolt uses in place of Radewijns’s excipere, and which Van Engen translates as “extract,” had acquired the secondary meaning “copy down” in medieval Latin; see Blaise, Dictionnaire latin-français des auteurs du moyen-âge, s.v. extraho. ⁷⁶ See above, 170–1 with note 60.

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Bonaventure’s three-phase account of the soul’s formation, deformation, and reformation, and the influence of the Bonaventuran three ways is detectable in Zerbolt’s use of metaphors of purgation for describing the process of reformation.⁷⁷ The exercises are however not arranged on the plan of the three ways, but on another Bonaventuran model, that of the soul’s ascent to its creator.⁷⁸ In De reformacione, the model is applied to the three powers of the soul: the intellect, the memory, and the will are to be restored to their original condition, in which they were able to perceive God; they lost this ability as a consequence of humankind’s fall from grace, which Zerbolt figures as a “going down” (descensus), but may ascend again through a program of progressive spiritual exercises, which are targeted at each of the soul’s faculties in turn.⁷⁹ In De spiritualibus ascensionibus the exercises form the steps (gradus) of three successive ascents (ascensus), each one corresponding to and designed to undo the effects of one of the three descents which are said to have afflicted humankind since the creation: Adam’s fall from the state of rectitude, caused by his own disobedience; the fall of the entire human race into impurity of heart, caused by carnal concupiscence; finally, the fall into dissimilitude, brought about by mortal sin which blots out the original likeness of each human individual to God.⁸⁰ “General Schemes for Making Meditations” on the last things feature among the exercises for restoring the memory to its prelapsarian condition (De reformacione), or as steps on the second ascent, which is intended to recover humankind’s lost purity of heart (De spiritualibus ascensionibus).⁸¹ These schemes cover exactly the same topics (death, judgment, hell, heaven) and more or less the same points as the meditation plans of the Tractatulus, to which they are textually related. ⁷⁷ Cf. Zerbolt, De reformacione 3, ed. Legrand, 104; Zerbolt, De spiritualibus ascensionibus 3, 15, ed. Legrand, 112, 150–2; Devotio Moderna, trans. Van Engen, 249, 259–60. ⁷⁸ For Bonaventure’s model of ascent in the Itinerarium mentis in Deum, see Chapter 1, 34–5. ⁷⁹ Zerbolt introduces the program with the New Testament parable of the Good Samaritan, interpreting the unfortunate traveler who “went down [descendavit] from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell among robbers” (Lk 10:30) as an allegory of Adam’s fall from divine grace, which happened when the lower faculties of his soul rebelled against the higher; Zerbolt, De reformacione 1, ed. Legrand, 94–7. On the structure of the treatise and its restorative program of exercises, see the introduction to the edition by Legrand, 28–35; also Staubach, “Meditation,” 190–1. Besides the general influence of the Bonaventuran gradus and ascensus model, there is a proximate source for Zerbolt’s program in a treatise by Bonaventure’s contemporary and fellow Franciscan David of Augsburg (d. 1272), De exterioris et interioris hominis compositione. A considerable portion of this treatise, which originated in talks of spiritual direction delivered by the author to novice friars, is concerned with the three powers of the soul, and how these may be conformed to God through ascetic discipline and spiritual exercise; the process of conformation is figured by David as an ascent (ascensus) which proceeds by a series of steps (gradus) to reverse the effects of humankind’s fall from grace: David of Augsburg, De compositione 2 pt. 1, praefatiuncula 1; 2.5–10; 3.63, ed. College of St. Bonaventure, 64–5, 85–95, 338–47. ⁸⁰ On the contents of the treatise and their arrangement, see Zerbolt, De spiritualibus ascensionibus, ed. Legrand, 23–8, and Zerbolt, Geestelijke opklimmingen, trans. van Dijk, 69–93, 121–48, 155–68; also Staubach, “Meditation,” 191–5. ⁸¹ Zerbolt, De reformacione 21–4, ed. Legrand, 160–74; Zerbolt, De spiritualibus ascensionibus 19–21, 24, ed. Legrand, 160–76, 182–6. The chapter titles vary the formula: either generalis modus ad formandum meditaciones (“general scheme for making meditations”), or generalis modus meditandi (“general scheme for meditating”), or simply generales meditaciones (“general meditations”).

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There is, however, a crucial difference. Whereas Radewijns simply presents bare inventories of eschatological themes and topics from which the reader may extract at will, Zerbolt composes the separate elements into directed exercises that encourage their readers to recompose the very same elements into a total meditative picture or experience of the last things. He achieves this integration through the employment of three standard techniques for composing meditational texts: syntactic connectors, rhetorical amplification, and perspectivization. The addition of syntactic connectors enhances textual cohesion and also programs the temporal sequence of any realization of the textual inputs in actual meditation. In the schemes for meditating on death, for example, the separate points are joined into a sequence and the flow of the meditation is directed by means of ordinals, temporal conjunctions, and imperatives: “First, that you should always consider the hour of death uncertain . . . Then go over the order in which death is approached”; “Think how bitter it will be to become separated from those delights [to which you were always in thrall] . . . Then think and shape in yourself such an affection as if your soul had suddenly to depart: How freely you would leave all delight behind.”⁸² Syntactic connectors are deployed between as well as within exercises: in De spiritualibus ascensionibus, the two exercises immediately following on from the meditation on death begin: “Turn your mental eye next upon the last judgment,” and “Turn your eyes next to the region of the damned and the prison of the miserable.”⁸³ The result is to gather the three eschatological meditations that constitute the first step of the second ascent (heaven, the fourth meditation, belongs to the following step) into a single sequence, which might be realized in order either in a single session or over three separate sessions.⁸⁴ The syntactically connected points are often amplified and embroidered with details which enhance their psychological impact and vividness. Whereas (to take another example from the schemes for death) the Tractatulus simply suggests that the reader might wish to reflect on “How brief all the time of life now passed will seem to [the dying person], like a moment,” or “How [the deceased] is buried and consigned to eternal oblivion,” the equivalent points in De spiritualibus ⁸² Zerbolt, De reformacione 21, ed. Legrand, 160: “Primo ut horam mortis semper suspectam habeas . . . Revolve deinde ordinem quoad mortem devenitur.” Zerbolt, De spiritualibus ascensionibus 19, ed. Legrand, 162: “Cogita quam amarum erit tibi tunc a delectacionibus separari . . . Deinde, cogita et forma in te talem affectum ut, si anima tua statim deberet exire, quam libenter omnem delectacionem relinqueres.” Devotio Moderna, trans. Van Engen, 262. Cf. Radewijns, Tractatulus 16, ed. Legrand, 94, 96, where the uncertainty of the hour of death, the physical ailments that lead up to it, and the difficulty that sinners have in taking leave of worldly pleasures, are all presented as discrete points for reflection. ⁸³ Zerbolt, De spiritualibus ascensionibus 20, ed. Legrand 166: “Deinde, oculum mentalem verte ad extremum iudicium.” Ibid. 21, ed. Legrand 170: “Deinde verte oculum ad regionem dampnatorum et carcerem miserorum.” Devotio Moderna, trans. Van Engen, 263, 265. ⁸⁴ The first step of the second ascent, which is constituted by meditations on death, the last judgment, and the punishments of hell, is intended to instill fear (Zerbolt, De spiritualibus ascensionibus 16, ed. Legrand, 154–6; Devotio Moderna, trans. Van Engen, 260–1); the second, which begins with meditation on the kingdom of heaven, is directed at inspiring hope (ibid. 22, ed. Legrand, 176–80; trans. Van Engen, 266–7).

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ascensionibus develop the “how” of the perception or event into extended processes which the meditator is obliged to experience or witness in person: “Think then how brief will seem in that hour the whole of your life and your delights. You will see then your whole life pass away as a dream or a shadow, especially when you begin to weigh in eternity, which never ends”; “Then follow the bier to the burial and see how that poor body, for which so many delights were sought, is given over to the earth, food for the worms consigned to eternal oblivion.”⁸⁵ To amplify his points Zerbolt occasionally drew on texts that Radewijns excerpted and collected in the Libellus. The process may be illustrated from the following examples which juxtapose, in sequence: a point from the scheme for meditating on the last judgment in Radewijns’s Tractatulus; the equivalent point from the same scheme in Zerbolt’s De spiritualibus ascensionibus; a thematically related excerpt in the Libellus. From the juxtaposition, two things will be immediately apparent: Zerbolt’s amplification consists in the rhetorically enlivening invention of direct speech, or sermocinatio;⁸⁶ and the source of the words that he puts into the mouth of the devil is the very same passage from Augustine (actually Pseudo-Augustine) that Radewijns excerpted for his Libellus.⁸⁷ How the devil will accuse us, pointing out all the sins we committed and good deeds we omitted, the time and place, etc. Quomodo accusabit nos diabolus ostendens omnia mala commissa et bona dimissa, tempus et locum, etc.⁸⁸ The devil will be a witness there, pointing out to us the sins we committed together with their times and places, and he will say, “Most equitable Judge, judge this man to be mine on account of his guilt; in his pride he never wanted to be yours.” Testis erit ibi diabolus, qui ostendet nobis peccatum quod commisimus, tempus quando et locum ubi peccavimus, et dicet: “Equissime iudex, iudica hunc esse meum ob culpam, qui tuus esse noluit propter superbiam.”⁸⁹

⁸⁵ Radewijns, Tractatulus 16, ed. Legrand, 96: “Quam breve videbitur sibi tunc omne tempus vite transactum, quasi momentum. . . . Quomodo sepelitur et traditur eterne oblivioni.” Zerbolt, De spiritualibus ascensionibus 19, ed. Legrand, 162, 164: “Cogita deinde in illa hora quam breve tibi videbitur omne tempus vite tue et delectationum tuarum. Tunc, videbis totum tempus tuum transisse sicut sompnum vel sicut umbram, maxime cum perpendis instare eternitatem, que numquam finietur. . . . Deinde, sequere funus ad sepulturam et vide quomodo caro misera, propter quam tanto tempore quesivit delectationes, terre traditur et vermibus esca paratur et traditur perpetue oblivioni.” Devotio Moderna, trans. Van Engen, 262, 263. There is a comparable amplification of the equivalent points in De reformacione 21, ed. Legrand, 162, 164. ⁸⁶ Sermocinatio serves the purpose of characterization, and thus enhances the vividness of a rhetorical presentation; see Lausberg, Handbuch, sections 820–5. ⁸⁷ Pseudo-Augustine, De salutaribus documentis 62, PL 40:1073. ⁸⁸ Radewijns, Tractatulus 18, ed. Legrand, 100. ⁸⁹ Zerbolt, De spiritualibus ascensionibus 20, ed. Legrand, 168; Devotio Moderna, trans. Van Engen, 264.

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Augustine: “Then the devil will be at hand, reciting the words of our profession, and confronting us with whatever sins we committed, no matter where and when, and all the good that we ought to have done in that time. Truly that adversary will say, Most equitable Judge, judge this man to be mine for his guilt, who never wanted to be yours by grace; he is yours by nature, mine by his wretchedness; yours on account of your passion, mine because of my persuasion; to you he was disobedient, to me obedient; from you he received the mantle of immortality, from me this coat of rags which he wears; he took off your robe and came here with mine,” etc. Augustinus. “Presto tunc erit dyabolus, recitans verba professionis nostre, et obiciens nobis quecumque, et in quo loco et in qua hora peccavimus, et quid boni tunc temporis facere debuimus. Dicturus est enim ille adversarius: Equissime iudex, iudica istum meum esse per culpam, qui tuus esse noluit per graciam; tuus est per naturam, meus per miseriam; tuus ob passionem, meus ob suasionem; tibi inobediens, michi obediens; a te accepit immortalitatis stolam, a me accepit hanc pannosam qua indutus est tunicam; tuum vestem dimisit, cum mea huc venit” etc.⁹⁰

Zerbolt goes a step further than interconnecting and vividly amplifying his points, however, because for each of his schemes he also delineates a consistent point of view into which meditating readers may insert themselves and from which they may compose all the elements of the scheme into a sustained, total, and above all determinate experience of the events and locales of the last end. This kind of perspectival integration is potentially available to users of Radewijns’s scheme for meditating on death in the Tractatulus devotus, although in order to realize it they would first have to undo the antithetical structure into which the author has cast his points. Each one of these is formulated as a contrast between an aspect of death as it is experienced by sinners on the one hand and the same aspect as the just and righteous experience it on the other, for instance: “How great the pangs of conscience will be on account of the sins one has done and the good deeds one has left undone when all these things are recollected. And how great, by contrast, the joy of the good will be on account of their purity of conscience.”⁹¹ In the corresponding schemes of De reformacione and De spiritualibus ascensionibus, the antitheses have been split apart and their terms recomposed as discrete, selfcontained exercises, each one leading the meditator through the whole process of dying from the viewpoint of either a sinner or a just and righteous person. In De reformacione, the exercise is described in full from the sinner’s perspective only; at ⁹⁰ Radewijns, Libellus 2.35, ed. van Woerkum, 2:137–8. ⁹¹ Radewijns, Tractatulus 18, ed. Legrand, 94: “Quantus erit remorsus consciencie de malis commissis et bonis omissis, quum tunc omnia hec ad memoriam venient. Et quantum econtra gaudium erit bonis de puritate consciencie.”

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the very end the author remarks: “You may moreover apply this scheme ex contrario for the death of the just.”⁹² The technique of stimulating meditations from the point of view of a particular type of dying person is developed even further in De spiritualibus ascensionibus, where the points are arranged so as to program three perspectivally distinct schemes: “Consider therefore and, so far as you are able, form within you the affections of a dying man. Dispose yourself and your meditation as if you were about to die” (this introduces a series of points relating to the fear and remorse that will be experienced by a person dying in a state of sin); “On another occasion, place before your eyes the image of some dying man, and carefully note the form, means, and order by which he comes to die” (the focus of this exercise is the external circumstances that accompany death, and the terror they inspire: the final infirmity of the body, the flocks of demons waiting to seize their prey, the soul standing before the judge in trepidation, the corpse consumed by worms in the grave); “On the other hand, you ought also at times to assume the affections of a just man dying, well disposed towards death. Think how happy he will be to leave who repented beforehand, purged himself from such [earthly] delights, loved nothing in this world of such evils, and so on through the particulars.”⁹³ In the schemes for meditating on hell and heaven, the predelineated perspective is that of the onlooker who builds up a complete picture of the physical locale by adding details one by one—a process that anticipates the technique of compositio loci, the procedure of mentally creating the concrete setting in which the objects of meditation are to be placed, that Ignatius Loyola will deploy in the Spiritual Exercises.⁹⁴ In De spiritualibus ascensionibus, these schemes are remarkable for ⁹² Zerbolt, De reformacione 21, ed. Legrand, 164: “Poteris autem modum hunc ex contrario assumere de morte iustorum.” ⁹³ Zerbolt, De spiritualibus ascensionibus 19, ed. Legrand, 160, 164, 166: “Scrutare igitur et, quantum potes, in te interdum affectum transforma hominis morientis, et forma in te et meditacione tua quasi statim moriturus esses . . . Item, interdum propone oculis tuis ymaginem alicuius hominis morientis et diligenter respice formam, modum et ordinem quibus ad mortem devenitur. . . . Econtrario, nonnunquam debes tibi affectum assumere iusti viri morientis et ad mortem bene dispositi, cogitando quam letus talis exit, qui prius penituit et se a delectacionibus purgavit et nichil hic viciose dilexit, et sic de alijs.” Devotio Moderna, trans. Van Engen, 262, 263. ⁹⁴ Ignatius Loyola explains the technique in Exercitia spiritualia section 47, ed. Calveras and Dalmases, 186; Spiritual Exercises, trans. Ganss, 40: “When a contemplation or meditation is about something that can be gazed on, for example, a contemplation of Christ our Lord, who is visible, the composition will be to see in imagination the physical place where that which I want to contemplate is taking place.” It is possible that Zerbolt exerted an indirect influence on the Spiritual Exercises through the mediation of García de Cisneros (1455–1510), whose Exercitatorio de la vida espiritual explicitly commends Zerbolt’s De spiritualibus ascensionibus to readers (prólogo, Obras completas 2:94; Book of Exercises, trans. Peers, 6) and contains schemes for meditating on the last things that are clearly derived from Zerbolt’s treatises. Ignatius may have used a compendium of the Exercitatorio during his time at Manresa and Montserrat (where Cisneros was abbot until his death) in the early 1520s, and he may even have encountered Zerbolt’s writings at first hand during his time in Paris: the Collège de Montaigu, where he enrolled for study in 1528, featured New Devout authors in the reading program of its students. See O’Malley, First Jesuits, 28–9, 46; O’Reilly, “Exercises”; Ruiz Jurado, “Ejercitatorio”; Van Engen, Sisters and Brothers, 317–18. Two other systematic handbooks of spiritual exercise that were indebted to Zerbolt and may have mediated Devotio Moderna practice to Ignatius were the Scala

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accompanying their instructions with a statement of the epistemological theory of what they ask their readers to accomplish: Turn your eyes next to the region of the damned and the prison of the miserable, carefully examining what goes on there, what for a house and place it is. Our blinded minds are better led to a knowledge of the invisible through the visible and sensible, and so to better sense those pains, take up the similitudes of hell put in writing by the saints. See therefore hell itself, a most horrible chaos, a subterranean place sunk in the depths, totally dark, the deepest pit and yet totally enflamed, all a great burning furnace with terrible leaping flames, a great city dark and murky, totally alight and burning, full of an infinite multitude of people crying out, giving forth the most miserable sounds, screamed out with grief and ardor, people mutually tearing at one another in envy like mad dogs bound together. ... You can find in the saints sensible similitudes of that celestial homeland adjusted to suit our capacities. That city is therefore most glorious in breadth, of the purest gold and wonderfully constructed out of the most precious gems, with pearls for each of its gates. It is a spacious field abloom with all the most beautiful flowers. There it is always summer most pleasant, the most fragrant scents, and a plenty of every delight. Deinde verte oculum ad regionem dampnatorum et carcerem miserorum, diligenter scrutans que ibi aguntur, qualis sit illa mansio et quis locus. Quia autem mens nostra ceca melius per visibilia et sensibilia ducitur ad noticiam invisibilium, ideo, ut illas penas melius sencias, potes tibi assumere similitudines a sanctis super hoc in Scripturis positas. Aspice igitur infernum, chaos horribilissimum, locum subterraneum et profundissimum totumque tenebrosum, puteum profundissimum et totaliter ignitum, fornacem totum incensum et terribiliter flammantem, civitatem magnam, tenebrosam, obscuram, totam incensam et ardentem, plenam infiniti populi multitudine, clamantibus universis et mirabiles sonitus dantibus et ejaculatus pre dolore et ardore et ex invidia se mutuo mordentibus, tamquam si canes rabidi simul essent coniuncti. ...

meditationis by Wessel Gansfort (1418–1489), and the Rosetum exercitiorum spiritualium et sacrarum meditationum by Jan Mombaer or Mauburnus, also known as John of Brussels (1460–1501). On these see Staubach, “Meditation,” 202–4; Enenkel, “Wessel Gansfort”; Debongnie, Jean Mombaer, chap. 2; Watrigant, “L’École des Frères”; Watrigant, “Jean Mauburnus”; Smits van Waesberghe, “Origine et développement.”

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Poteris autem de celesti illa patria similitudines sensibiles assumere a sanctis pro nostra capacitate adinventas. Est igitur civitas illa, gloriosissima amplitudine et capacitate permaxima, ex auro mundissimo gemmisque preciosissimis mirabiliter constructa. Singule eius porte sunt ex singulis maragaritis. Est item campus speciosissimus, omnium florum pulchritudine decoratus. Ibi, semper est estas amenissima, ibi, odoris suavitas fragrantissima et omnium delectabilium copia.⁹⁵

The principle that the “blinded minds” of humans “are better led to a knowledge of the invisible through the visible and sensible” is derived from Grote’s treatise De quattuor generibus meditabilium. There Grote argues that it is legitimate to meditate on “imagined and fictive objects” (imaginata et ficta) because these are “corporeal and sensible things” (corporales et sensibiles res) which permit human minds, whose sight is darkened and would be ruined by too much light, “to ascend in some way at least from the visible to the invisible” (de visibilibus aliqualiter saltem ad invisibilia conscendere).⁹⁶ In proposing that his readers should obtain “visible and sensible” analogues of heaven and hell from among the “similitudes put in writing by the saints,” Zerbolt is conflating Grote’s category of imaginata et ficta with a further category of suitable objects for meditation, namely “matters revealed or said to be revealed to certain saints” (quae sanctis aliquibus de eisdem sunt vel dicuntur revelata) which are recorded in writing.⁹⁷ The conflation is probably deliberate, and has been done for two reasons. First, saintly revelations concerning the afterlife are frequently recorded in the guise of concrete images that other, less privileged minds may picture to themselves, such as the bottomless pit, the lake of fire, the city with its walls of precious stones, streets of pure gold, and gates made of single pearls that feature in John’s visions of hell and heaven in the Book of Revelation (11:7; 17:8; 20:1; 20:9; 20:14; 21:18–21). Second, Zerbolt’s meditative schemes are put together out of texts from the Bible and other Christian authors. Descriptions of hell as a horrible chaos, as an abyssal depth, or as a place filled with profound darkness, flames, wailing and torment, are found in the Golden Legend, in the Vision of Tnugdalus, and in the Pseudo-Bernardian Meditationes piissimae—all texts excerpted by Florens Radewijns for the Libellus, on which Zerbolt appears to have drawn for his own catalogue of features;⁹⁸ the evocation of the celestial city as an edifice of gold and precious stones, with a meadow of sweet-smelling flowers, brimful with delights of every conceivable kind ⁹⁵ Zerbolt, De spiritualibus ascensionibus, 21, 24, ed. Legrand, 170–2, 182–4; Devotio Moderna, trans. Van Engen, 265, 268, modified. The equivalent schemes in Zerbolt’s other treatise commence with the same passages in abbreviated form, simply describing the contents as similitudes set forth or invented by the saints, but without explaining the epistemology that underlies them: De reformacione 22, 24, ed. Legrand, 166, 172–4. ⁹⁶ Grote, De quattuor generibus meditabilium, ed. Tolomio, 48–54; Devotio Moderna, trans. Van Engen, 99–101. ⁹⁷ Ibid., ed. Tolomeo, 46–8; trans. Van Engen, 99. ⁹⁸ Radewijns, Libellus 2.35, 38, 39, ed. van Woerkum, 2:138, 141, 143–4.

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draws on the Book of Revelation (21:15–27) and Seuse’s Horologium sapientiae, both again excerpted extensively in the Libellus under the heading “Concerning the supercelestial delights” (De gaudiijs supercelestibus).⁹⁹ In De spiritualibus ascensionibus, it is not only short sequences of exercises or separate points of single exercises that must be mentally recomposed into some kind of whole—a “session” of eschatological remembrance devoted to several last things, or a complete scene or experience of one of them—but the entire text of the treatise. Before they put the program of ascents into practice, Zerbolt’s readers are instructed to reconstitute the treatise in their own minds as a personal exercise plan. The instruction occurs at a critical juncture in the argument of De spiritualibus ascensionibus, after the introductory exposition of the three descents that define the human condition, and before the step-by-step description of the ascents by which this fallen state is to be overcome. At this point of transition, Zerbolt reprises the Psalm verses with which the treatise opened: “Blessed is the man whose help is from thee: in his heart he hath disposed his ascents from the valley of tears to the place he hath appointed” (Ps 83:6–7), and addresses the reader with an exhortation “to dispose in your heart a method that is suited to you and by which you may reach your end” (in corde tuo modum tibi congruum disponere quo possis ad finem tuum . . . pervenire); “the firm fixing and imprinting [of such a plan] upon your heart” (cordi tuo fortiter infigere et imprimere), he continues, “will be of manifold utility to you,” because it will ensure consistency and regularity of practice, diminish the danger of being led astray by others, and provide the balance and variety that are necessary if the appetite for exercise is not to flag.¹⁰⁰ Zerbolt reinforces and illustrates his instruction to the reader by way of an example and two analogies. All three are derived from the sphere of artisanal production. The example is Moses receiving his instructions from God about how to fashion the six-branched candlestick of the tabernacle: “See that thou make all things according to the pattern which was shown thee on the mount” (Exodus 25:40, but cited by Zerbolt in the New Testament’s recapitulation of the verse in Hebrews 8:5); the analogies are of a builder, who works out the plan of the house to be built before setting about its actual construction, and of God, the supreme artisan, who created the world and everything it contains according to a prior concept. Zerbolt embeds these concrete illustrations in a warning against unsystematic dilettantism in spiritual exercise:

⁹⁹ Ibid. 2.40, 2.41, ed. van Woerkum, 2:146, 147. ¹⁰⁰ Zerbolt, De spiritualibus ascensionibus 9, ed. Legrand, 132–6; Devotio Moderna, trans. Van Engen, 255–6, modified. Zerbolt quotes the Psalm in the version of the Gallican Psalter: “Beatus vir cuius auxilium est abs te, ascensiones in corde disposuit in valle lacrymarum in locum quem posuit” (83:6–7).

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. . . do everything in order as you have disposed it in your heart, and not casually like one of those inconstant and footloose types who does this exercise today and that one tomorrow, grabbing at everything and advancing in nothing, trying everything and finishing nothing, doing whatever comes up since he has nothing disposed or fixed in his heart. You should not be like that, but do everything instead according to the ascent you disposed in your heart, so that you may advance by following that method and utterly realize the pattern you have placed in your heart. “Make all things,” the Lord said to Moses, “according to the pattern which was shown to you on the mount.” You, therefore, should seek to complete everything according to the pattern which you disposed in all its distinct parts in your heart. If a craftsman had not first disposed in his heart the form and disposition of the house he is to build, constructing first of all a model house in his heart, he would never produce a proper house in reality or construct it according to its proper disposition. Similarly it is necessary for you first to erect a ladder inside your heart, according to which pattern you will do everything outwardly. Likewise God, the first cause of all things, would not have brought forth all things in reality in their proper disposition and form without first having the essential pattern and idea of all things. . . . ut omnia ordinate agas secundum quod in corde disposuisti, et non casualiter sicut quidam qui hodie se in isto, cras in alio exercentes, fluidi et vagabundi, omnia arripientes et in nullo proficientes, omnia attemptantes et in nullo se consummantes, fortuite omnia prout occurrunt agentes, cum de nullo se in corde disposuerunt nec sint fixe de aliquo deliberati. Tu autem non sic, sed omnia facies secundum quod in corde ascensiones disposuisti, ad hoc omnia opera et exercicia dirigas, ut illo modo proficias et ad exemplar quod in corde posuisti consumas. “Omnia,” inquit Dominus Moysi, “facito ad exemplar quod tibi monstratum est in monte.” Tu autem, omnia stude perficere secundum exemplar quod discrete in corde disposuisti. Si artifex non prius in corde suo formam et disposicionem domus quam edificaturus est disposuerit, prius in corde fabricans domum typicam, numquam debite domum exterius produceret vel in debita disposicione fabricaret. Ita oportet ut et tu ascensurus, prius tibi scalam in corde erigas, ad eius exemplar omnia foris agas. Sic Deus, prima causa omnium, non nisi ad essenciale omnium rerum exemplar et ydeas res ipsas in congrua disposicione et forma produxit in esse.¹⁰¹

The references to artisanship and to the ladder in particular evoke Benedict’s Rule, with its metaphorics of the religious life as a craft activity conducted in a workshop with its tools for managing the routines of daily life and its ladder for climbing

¹⁰¹ Zerbolt, De spiritualibus ascensionibus 9, ed. Legrand, 134; Devotio Moderna, trans. Van Engen, 255, modified.

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heavenwards. But whereas Benedict’s ladder connotes the know-how of monastic orthopraxis, and climbing it is a metaphor for making progress in a vocation where knowledge is acquired and demonstrated practically, Zerbolt’s ladder is a metaphor for the Bonaventuran regimen of the soul.¹⁰² It exists as an ideal blueprint, as a “ladder inside the heart,” before it is climbed in actuality. The word for that blueprint, which Zerbolt repeats insistently in the quoted passage, is exemplar. The person embarking on the spiritual ascents must first have the exemplar of the regimen disposed in all its distinct parts (discrete) in her heart, and must climb according to the exemplar of the ladder she has erected there; Moses is instructed by God to consult the exemplar that he was shown on the mount, which specifies the design of the candlestick and its associated utensils, right down to the details of the ornamentation and the quantity of gold to be used (Ex 25:31–9); every single item in God’s creation is said to be the realization of its essential exemplar. The word, meaning “pattern” or “model” from which the artisan copies, also has an application in the domain of written textuality: exemplar can refer to both the text from which a scribe copies as well as the new copy that is thereby created.¹⁰³ Although the immediate context in De spiritualibus ascensionibus foregrounds the meaning “artisan’s pattern or model,” the fact that the pattern of the spiritual ascents is laid out before the reader’s eyes in the rest of the book unavoidably brings into play the further meanings of textual exemplar and copy. The chapters that follow after the instruction, in which the steps—the distinct or discrete parts—of the ascents are carefully disposed in an ordered progression, provide an exemplar for the reader to copy into her own heart; that copy in turn becomes the exemplar for the reader’s personal program of spiritual exercise, whose execution reproduces—copies—the order of ascents fixed and imprinted upon the heart. No matter whether it is carried on in the sphere of artisanal or textual production, the activity of copying need not equate to slavish reproduction of the model; there is always room for adaptation and redaction. Zerbolt’s exemplars of spiritual exercise are no exception: at every stage of their production and reproduction there already has been, or will be, a process of reordering and recomposition. The primary exemplar, the text of De spiritualibus ascensionbus, is literally constituted out of other texts—excerpts and processings of excerpts— which the author has adapted and arranged according to a concept (the restitution of the soul to its pristine state) and an order of exposition (the three descents and their corresponding ascents). A further round of recomposition is envisaged at the stage when the reader transfers the program of the literal book to the metaphorical book of her heart. “Before you ascend,” Zerbolt admonishes, “you must dispose in

¹⁰² See section 2 of Chapter 1, 20–38. ¹⁰³ The meaning “copy, transcript” is attested from Classical Latin onwards, the extension to mean “original, text from which to transcribe” is medieval; see Oxford Latin Dictionary, Mittellateinisches Wörterbuch, Lexicon Latinitatis Nederlandicae Medii Aevi s.v. exemplar.

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your heart a method suited to you [modum tibi congruum] by which you may reach your goal . . . Order, I say, a precise goal in your heart, in pursuit of which you will perform all your works and exercises; then order the steps, exercises, and definite method by which you are to attain that goal.”¹⁰⁴ It follows that the exemplar fixed and imprinted in the reader’s heart is not necessarily an exact copy of the order of Zerbolt’s book; rather it is “a method suited to you,” an order adapted in other words to the reader’s individual needs and capabilities.¹⁰⁵ Still further adjustments to the order are anticipated during the practical execution of the plan. It is essential when making the exercises, Zerbolt informs the reader, to keep in mind the difference between the means and the end. The latter “should be so fixed and immovably imprinted upon your heart that you never depart from it by any accident, advice, or order from another,” but the former should be deployed variably and always with an eye to their efficacy; an exercise should be abandoned if persevering with it would only conduce to boredom and resentment: “When [the means] obstruct the end, they are to be abandoned. . . . We should never be so totally fixated upon such exercises as we are upon their end.”¹⁰⁶ To make the spiritual ascents is thus to perform a perpetual recalibration and recomposition of the exemplar already disposed in the meditating subject’s heart; in doing so, the meditator recalibrates and recomposes the faculties of her soul, while at the same time perpetuating the principle by which the exemplar of that exemplar, the text of De spiritualibus ascensionibus, was first composed and disposed by its author Gerard Zerbolt.

3. Iterate and multiply Like the Deventer treatises, the Cordiale, seu quatuor novissima is a text put together out of other texts. It is not however the compositional operations of

¹⁰⁴ Zerbolt, De spiritualibus ascensionibus 9, ed. Legrand, 132: “Priusquam ascendere . . . debes in corde tuo modum tibi congruum disponere quo possis ad finem tuum, qui est puritas cordis vel caritas pervenire. . . . Ordina, inquam finem aliquem in corde tuo, cuius gracia omnia opera tua et exercicia perficias. Ordina deinde gradus, exercicia et modum aliquem quo ad finem illum devenies.” Devotio Moderna, trans. Van Engen, 255. ¹⁰⁵ There is indirect evidence from at least two sources that Zerbolt’s readers literally redisposed the order of the text to suit their own purposes: manuscripts of De spiritualibus ascensionibus (in Latin and also Middle Dutch translation) with marginalia assigning meditation exercises to specific days of the week, or even particular times on those days; plans of weekly cycles of spiritual exercise which direct their readers to take the materials they need for their meditations from De spiritualibus ascensionibus. See van Dijk, “Wochenpläne”; for the use of these schemes among Devout lay brothers, with an edition of some examples, see Kock, “Lektüre,” 26–30, 35–55. ¹⁰⁶ Zerbolt, De spiritualibus ascensionibus 10, ed. Legrand, 136–8: “Finem enim tuum . . . ita in corde tuo debes figere et immobiliter imprimere, ut nullo casu, nullo consilio, nullius imperio ab eo discedas . . . Ea vero que sunt ad finem, . . . cum vero nos a tali fine . . . impediunt, libere relinquere. . . . Nec in talibus exercicijs ita ex toto debemus esse fixi sicut in fine.” Devotio Moderna, trans. Van Engen, 256.

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excerpting and reordering that the reader must replicate in making meditations, but the rhetorical maneuvers that generate the argumentative discourse of the text. The author of the Cordiale, most probably Gerard van Vliederhoven, explains his motives for writing in a brief preface which begins: “Remember thy last end and thou shalt never sin.” Ecclesiasticus 7 [Sir 7:40]. As blessed Augustine says in his book of meditations, “You ought to avoid the filth of sin more than the excess of torments in hell.” Since therefore the knowledge and frequent recollection of the last things call us back from sinning, join us to virtue, keep and confirm us in every good work, I have resolved under the inspiration of divine grace to speak and tell a little of these last things, namely what and how many they are. Memore novissima tua et in eternum non peccabis. Eccles[iastici] viio. Sicud dicit beatus Augustinus in libro suarum meditationum: Plus vitanda est sola peccati feditas quam quelibet tormentorum immanitas. Cum igitur novissimorum noticia et illorum frequens memoria a peccatis nos revocat, virtutibus copulat, et in omni opere bono retinet et confimat, ideo divina inspirante gratia de hiis novissimis, videlicet que et quot sunt illa modicum proposui dicere et narrare.¹⁰⁷

The author’s purpose, to expand the biblical injunction “Remember thy last end” into a continuous discourse that will help readers to make eschatological meditations as part of a project of personal religious reform, is elaborated in the immediately following sentences. First, the “what” and the “how many” of the introductory statement are identified as the traditional four last things of individual eschatology: death, judgment, hell, and heaven.¹⁰⁸ Next, the four things and their regular remembrance are metaphorized as “four wheels on the chariot of the

¹⁰⁷ Gerard, Cordiale, fol. 37r. The quotation attributed to Augustine is actually Anselm, Orationes 14, SAO 3:50; cf. Prayers and Meditations, trans. Ward, 191. On the authorship of the Cordiale and the date and circumstances of its composition, see the literature cited in notes 15 and 16 to this chapter. There is no modern edition of the Latin text; I quote it from the oldest surviving manuscript: Utrecht, Universiteitsbibliotheek Ms. 331 (Ms. 4 J 18), ca. 1390–1400; http://objects.library.uu.nl/reader/index. php?obj=1874–334,144, accessed October 10, 2019. I have expanded scribal abbreviations, distinguished between u and v, and added modern punctuation. Where the text appears corrupt or defective, I have checked it against two further witnesses: British Library, Additional Ms. 41618, 15th century, and an early print by Richard Paffraet, Deventer 1491, GW 7508; resulting emendations to the Latin text are indicated by square brackets. ¹⁰⁸ Gerard, Cordiale, fol. 37r: “Est igitur notandum quod quatuor sunt novissima communiter apud sanctos in numero computata, sicud patet evidenter ex verbis beati Bernardi in quodam sermone sic dicentis: In omnibus operibus tuis memorare novissima tua, que quidem quatuor sunt, videlicet: mors, iudicium, jehenna, et gloria.” (It should be noted therefore that according to the saints the last things are commonly reckoned to be four in number, as will be plain from the words of blessed Bernard in one of his sermons: “In all your works remember your last things, which are four, namely death, judgment, hell, and the glory of heaven.”) Cf. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones in festivitatem omnium sanctorum, 1.10, SBO 5:335, though Bernard mentions only the first three of the last things.

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soul, conveying it [the soul] to eternal salvation.”¹⁰⁹ Finally, the author explains his choice of title for the treatise, which he proposes to call the Cordiale because the name (literally “heart-tonic, cordial”) corresponds to the way in which the material is presented and meant to be taken up by its readers: Since indeed this little work’s entire way of proceeding is principally and especially aimed at causing the frequent recollection of the last things to be imprinted unceasingly on the innermost depths of the human heart, it seems fitting if it please you to bestow upon the present little book the title “Cordial.” Verum cum totalis huius opusculi processus principaliter et precipue ad hoc conatur inducere ut novissimorum celebris memoria cordialiter et intime humanis cordibus continuo imprimatur, ergo videtur rei consonum ut presenti huic libellulo hoc nomen “Cordiale” loco sui tytuli si placeat imponatur.¹¹⁰

The important word here is processus, which has been translated as “way of proceeding.” Meaning both objectively unfolding “progression” and consciously adopted “procedure,” it refers in this context to the ensemble of sequenced actions which constitute the Cordiale as a process, from its composition right through to its uptake and reception: the author’s strategies for generating text and shaping these into a work made up of discrete discourses, the argumentative routines through which those discourses are rhetorically effective, and the thought processes of the readers who translate the discourses into the mental representations of their meditations.¹¹¹ So far as the author’s compositional strategies are concerned, Gerard declares in the same preface that he will proceed by “expounding to a certain extent as many aspects of these same [last things] as you like, briefly and taking them one by one, through the sayings of the saints and through

¹⁰⁹ Gerard, Cordiale, fol. 37r: “Ista sunt quatuor rote currus anime ipsam vehentes eam ad eternam salutem.” The chariot metaphor is of course Platonic (cf. Phaedrus 25–35 [246a–254e], trans. Fowler, 470–99), though the proximate source in this case is more likely to be, once again, Bernard of Clairvaux. The same passage of the sermon for the feast of All Saints cited in the preceding note compares the salutary effect of remembering the last things to the taming effect of whips (flagella) on a horse; in his sermon on Sg 1:8 (“To my company of horsemen in Pharaoh’s chariots have I likened you, my love”), Bernard develops the reference to Pharaoh’s chariots into an allegory of malice, luxury, and avarice, the three chariots sent by the devil to persecute the people of God, each with four wheels representing subsidiary vices of the cardinal vice (Sermones super Cantica Canticorum 39.3.6–4.9, SBO 2:21–3); and in a sermon on the way of the wicked and the way of the Lord, the four wheels of the chariot conveying the believer down the way of the Lord are amor, laetitia, timor, and tristitia (Sermones de diversis 72.4, SBO 6 pt. 1:310). A conflation of all of these passages is probably the intertext of Gerard’s chariot metaphor. ¹¹⁰ Gerard, Cordiale, fol. 37v. ¹¹¹ In addition to the meanings it had in Classical Latin of “forward movement, progress, course,” processus had acquired a range of technical applications by medieval Latin, where it designated: legal process and procedure; the course or development of a book; an author’s or speaker’s line of reasoning or argumentation; the manner of proceeding in scientific demonstrations; see Oxford Latin Dictionary; Lexicon Latinitatis Nederlandicae Medii Aevi, s.v. processus.

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authorities and examples.”¹¹² And indeed his procedure consists in excerpting and compiling quotations—mainly from the Bible, patristic and postpatristic writers— to create a text that resembles a rapiarium organized around the topics of the four last things.¹¹³ This found textual matter is fused into continuous discourses, twelve in total, each one dealing with some or other topic relating to the last things; these topics may be expository in nature (for example, “The names for the places of hell are manifold”), or they may be admonitory, where the admonition is sometimes enunciated directly (“God’s judgment is to be feared”), at other times communicated indirectly, as the implicature of a constative utterance (so that, for example, the proposition “Remembrance of death makes a person accept penance willingly” implies an unarticulated “You ought to accept”).¹¹⁴ The argumentative process of these homily-like discourses relies on the repetition inherent in the two modes of utterance to which the collected “sayings, authorities, and examples” are subordinated: sententiousness and exemplarity. In rhetoric, a sententia is a maxim, typically expressed in the form of an aphorism, which states some general truth in relation to practical conduct or the way of the world and which owes its authority to its quality of “indefiniteness” or ¹¹² Gerard, Cordiale, fol. 37r: “ipsorum quotlibet sanctorum dictis auctoritatibus et exemplis singulariter et per se ac specialiter et precise quodammodo declarare.” ¹¹³ The majority of the citations are identified in the notes to Cordyal, ed. Mulders, 185–204. The most frequently cited Christian writer is Bernard of Clairvaux (including Pseudo-Bernardian writings), followed by Gregory the Great, Augustine, John Chrysostom, Jerome, and Peter of Blois; cf. De veer utersten, ed. Dusch, 16*. There is also a small number of quotations from pagan authors; these are concentrated in Part One, for the obvious reason that death, unlike the last judgment, hell, and heaven, is not a specifically Christian theme, and the sayings of Seneca, Cicero and others on human mortality had long been absorbed into the Christian tradition; the few pagan citations in the remaining parts of the Cordiale are Plato (fol. 54v), an unidentified “philosopher” (fol. 70v), Averroes (fol. 72r), and the “philosopher” of the Physics, i.e. Aristotle (fol. 81r). ¹¹⁴ The structure and contents of the Cordiale emerge clearly from its section and chapter headings. With minor variations, which do not affect either the division or the sense, these are as follows (from Byrn, “Late Medieval Eschatology,” 63 n. 5): Prologue: “Memorare novissima tua, et in eternum non peccabis” . . . Pt. 1 DE MORTE CORPORALI Chap. 1 Quod meditatio mortis facit hominem se humiliare Chap. 2 Quod meditatio mortis facit hominem omnia contemnere Chap. 3 Quod mors facit hominem penitentiam acceptare Pt. 2 DE EXTREMO IUDICIO Chap. 1 Quod iudicium timendum est propter multiplicem accusationem Chap. 2 Quod iudicium timendum est propter reddendam rationem Chap. 3 Quod iudicium timendum sit propter sententie prolationem Pt. 3 DE INFERNO Chap. 1 Quod multimoda est nominatio infernalium locorum Chap. 2 Quod multimoda est afflictio sodalium infernorum Chap. 3 Quod varia est conditio penarum infernorum Pt. 4 DE REGNO CELORUM Chap. 1 De pulchritudine regni celorum Chap. 2 De copiositate omnium bonorum regni celestis Chap. 3 De maxima et stabili letitia regni celestis Conclusion

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nonspecificity, to its applicability, in other words, in every single case that falls within the scope of its terms.¹¹⁵ An exemplum on the other hand is a concrete and particular constellation of specific persons and events, either invented or more usually taken from history, which provides a convincing parallel or precedent in support of an argument.¹¹⁶ Both modes of utterance are methods of rhetorical proof, and derive their suasive force from their capacity for appealing to the public’s world-knowledge and empirical experience; this makes them accessible even to an audience untrained in the technicalities of logical proofs and accounts for their long afterlife in medieval sermon rhetoric.¹¹⁷ Furthermore, because both utterance types draw attention to patterns of repetition in the occurrence of events, they are apt to be repeated themselves: the sententious utterance, because it bears repetition in every context in which it has relevance; the exemplary utterance, either because it actually is repeatable in respect of still other examples that may be adduced as illustrations of the historical pattern in question, or because to utter it is to envisage the possibility of repeated utterances in future.¹¹⁸ The modality of repetition is however not the same for sententious and exemplary utterance; the difference results from the indefiniteness of the former and the definiteness of the latter. The repetition of a sententious utterance yields a proliferation of maxims whose exact wording may vary but which all make the

¹¹⁵ See Lausberg, Handbuch, sections 872–9, who includes among definitions of the sententia the following: “esti de gnōmē apophansis, ou mentoi peri tōn kath’ hekaston . . . alla katholou” (Aristotle, Rhetoric 2.21 [1394a], trans. Freese, 278–9: A maxim is statement, not however concerning particulars . . . but general); “Sententia est oratio sumpta de vita quae aut quid sit aut quid esse oporteat in vita breviter ostendit” (Rhetorica ad Herennium 4.17.24, trans. Caplan, 288–9: A maxim is a saying drawn from life, which shows concisely either what happens or ought to happen in life). ¹¹⁶ Greek and Roman rhetoricians used the words paradeigma and exemplum to designate the entire genus of inductive arguments based on comparison, irrespective of whether the comparisons were factual or invented. See Aristotle, Rhetoric 2.20 [1393a23], trans. Freese, 272–3; Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 5.11.1–2, trans. Butler, 2:270–3, who observes that the Greeks applied the term paradeigma especially to examples taken from history, possibly because Aristotle, in the same passage of the Rhetoric, has names for the invented parable (parabolē) on the one hand and the equally fictitious fable (logos) on the other, but no special name for the historical example, which he merely describes as “relating things that have happened before” (Rhetoric 2.20 [1393a23], trans. Freese, 272–3: “to legein pragmata progegenēmena”); this lexical gap could have led to the generic term standing in for the species. On the different terminologies, and their slippages between genus and species, see Lausberg, Handbuch, sections 410–26. ¹¹⁷ Rhetorical proofs, also known as “artificial” or “artistic proofs” (entechnoi pisteis, probationes artificiales), are proofs created by the speaker using the means of art, in contradistinction to “inartificial” or “inartistic proofs” (atechnoi pisteis, probationes inartificiales), such as witness statements, which the speaker does not create but merely applies; see Lausberg, Handbuch, sections 350–7. For the use of proverbs and maxims in sermons, see Owst, Literature and Pulpit, 40–6. The classic study of exempla in medieval sermons is Welter, L’Exemplum; for more recent discussions, see Brémond et al., L’“Exemplum” 147–64; Palmer, “Exempla”; Schürer, Exemplum, chap. 2. ¹¹⁸ In the first case, the speech act of exemplifying, say, the class of twentieth-century British Chancellors of the Exchequer who subsequently became Prime Minister may be repeated several times over to name David Lloyd George, Harold Macmillan, James Callaghan, John Major, and so on. In the second case, to cite Angela Merkel as the sole example to date of a woman chancellor of the German Federal Republic is to present her as the first in a potentially extendable series of future women chancellors.

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same statement or, in Quintilian’s terminology, all express the same “sentiment”;¹¹⁹ to utter in succession the maxims “We shall all die,” “We are made of earth and shall return to earth,” “Death spares no one” is to iterate the statement “All humans are mortal.” The repetition of the exemplary utterance on the other hand leads to a proliferation of referentially nonidentical cases; to exemplify repeatedly by naming Alexander the Great, Croesus, Solomon, Aristotle, Plato, and so on as supremely powerful or rich or wise human beings who nevertheless had to die is not to iterate a universal maxim about the way of the world or the human condition, but to multiply distinct instances of the same pattern of events.¹²⁰ These operations of iteration and multiplication, so fundamental to the argumentative process of the Cordiale, are replicated in every meditative realization of its discourses. Such a realization moreover impresses on the reader that each operation implies the other. Every iteration of a sententia implies examples that could be multiplied by way of illustration; indeed, the very claim of an utterance to possess the universal validity of a sententia depends on the availability of a multiple of illustrative examples whose demonstrative power is not put into question by the existence of pertinent counterexamples. Conversely, each newly adduced example implies the iteration of a maxim under whose scope it and all the other actual and potential examples that constitute the multiple may be brought.¹²¹ The meditating reader of the Cordiale, ruminating for instance upon a discourse that constantly repeats the sententia “All humans are mortal” and equally constantly adduces examples of famous persons from history who, in spite of their great fame and accomplishments, could not avoid dying, will rapidly appreciate that each iteration of the sententia implies still more examples and that ¹¹⁹ Giving his preliminary definition of a sententia, Quintilian distinguished between the usage of the ancients, for whom the term referred to their opinion or sentiment (“quod animo sensissent”), and modern usage, according to which a sententia is a striking reflection (lumen); he acknowledged however that the older usage was still current among orators of his day: Institutio oratoria 8.5.1–2, trans. Butler, 3:280–1. ¹²⁰ This discussion takes its inspiration from Lyons’ account of iterativity and multiplicity in the discourse of exemplarity, though my focus is narrower than his. Taking Genette’s typology of “singulative,” “repetitive,” and “iterative” narratives as his model, Lyons considers the exemplum both as a purely discursive phenomenon and in its relation to the world outside the text. Considered as an event in written or spoken discourse, an exemplum is always implicitly, and often actually, multiple, in the sense that the reader could supplement further examples of the same pattern, or the text actually does narrate more than one exemplum; in its relation to extratextual reality, the same exemplum is said to be iterative, in the sense that it narrates once a pattern that occurs in the world more than once (Lyons, Exemplum, 26–8; cf. Genette, Figures III, 145–67). In my usage, the categories “multiplicity” and “iterativity” are considerably less rich than Lyons’ (or Genette’s), insofar as they refer to the recurrence of examples and maxims as discursive events only. ¹²¹ Such a maxim is not necessarily identical with the general statement that is immediately implied by the examples, because the statement may lack the indefiniteness essential for sententiousness. David Lloyd George and all the other politicians mentioned in note 118 to this chapter exemplify the general statement: “In the twentieth century, there were British Chancellors of the Exchequer who went on to be Prime Minister”; that statement, particular to one time and place, is not a sententia; a statement such as “High office is a stepping stone to still higher office” is.

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every new example added to the multiple is an implicit iteration of the sententia. Through the mental representation of these repetitions and their connections, the meditating reader will also realize something more: that the operations of iteration and multiplication may be continued beyond the textual discourse to include her own self, because the sententia, being universal, may be iterated in respect of the reader too, and the examples, untrammeled by valid counterexamples, may be multiplied all the way down to the reader’s own case.¹²² Rehearsing the processes of iteration and multiplication in the mind, grasping their mutual implication and also one’s own implication in their repetitions—that is what the processus of reading, internalizing, and embodying the discourse of the text involves for the reader; that is what it really means for the reader to imprint the words of a text that calls itself a “cordial” on the bottom of her heart. The heart is the seat of the emotions as well as the intellect, and the process of imprinting is accordingly affective at the same time as it is ratiocinative. The double appeal of the Cordiale, to the reader’s emotions as well as her reason, is already clear from its first chapter, which bears the title “That meditating on death causes a person to be humble” (Quod meditatio mortis facit hominem se humiliare). The proposition is taken from a compendium of preaching examples that Gerard excerpted from frequently, De dono timoris (The gift of fear; ca. 1263–1277) by Humbert of Romans;¹²³ the means of amplifying it however are not. Humbert lists humility as one of ten “fruits” of fearful meditation on death, and illustrates it briskly by citing, without further commentary, an exemplum and a verse from the Bible.¹²⁴ Gerard assembles around sixty citations from the Bible and pagan and Christian writers and augments them with his own commentary, working them into a sustained discourse which insistently iterates the sententia “All humans are mortal” and multiplies examples in support of it. Sometimes the sententia is repeated in variant formulation (“To die is our common fate”; “Death destroys all things, by death all things finish”); at other times it is iterated indirectly, through further maxims that either point out the reason for human mortality (“All men are earth and ashes”) or set out the consequences attendant ¹²² The textual process of multiplication was also continued in early printed editions of the text of the Cordiale “with examples.” These editions, all from Germany and the Low Countries, append collections of further examples to Gerard’s text, either at its very end (so-called “first collection,” GW 7505), or at the end of each of its four constituent books (“second collection,” GW 7506–14); these supplementary examples are taken predominantly from the same sources that Gerard uses, and sometimes even from the Cordiale itself; see Welter, L’Exemplum, 427–9. ¹²³ For Gerard’s use of De dono timoris (also known by its alternative title Tractatus de habundantia exemplorum), and possibly also of Humbert’s own source, the Tractatus de diversis materiis predicabilibus (ca. 1250–61) by Stephen of Bourbon, see Welter, L’Exemplum, 428–9; De veer utersten, ed. Dusch, 16*–26*. On Humbert and Stephen and their compilations, see Brett, Humbert of Romans; Humbert of Romans, De dono timoris, ed. Boyer, ix–xxv; Stephen of Bourbon, Tractatus, ed. Berlioz and Eichenlaub, 1:xv–xlvii. ¹²⁴ Humbert of Romans, De dono timoris 7, “De fructibus memorie mortis in timentibus eum,” ed. Boyer, 166. The exemplum is Ahab, from 3 Kgs 21:29, and the verse is Sir 10:9: “Why is earth and ashes proud?”

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upon the recognition of this inescapable truth (“Let everyone recognize his mortality and his pride will be broken”).¹²⁵ The maxim’s claim to universality is put to the test through a search for counterexamples which succeeds only in accumulating examples of powerful and exalted individuals from history who, however much they were otherwise set apart from the rest of the human race on account of their exceptional wealth, talent, or achievements, also died. Repeating the iterations of the maxim and the multiplications of the examples in the process of her own meditation, the reader realizes her own implication in their discourse, as she comes to recognize that the sentence “All humans are mortal” may be iterated in respect of herself, and that she too, being mere earth and ashes, is destined to become just another example of death’s dominion over humankind; the intended consequence of this meditative train of thought is that she too will adopt an attitude of humility. Humility is itself a compound of intellect and affect. As a behavioral disposition, it expresses both an understanding of one’s position (“Given my insignificant place in the scheme of things, I have no cause for pride”) and the capacity to be affected by them (“My insignificance inspires feelings of self-disgust in me”). In the Cordiale’s meditative orchestration of humility, the biblical maxim “All men are earth and ashes” plays a pivotal role. As a statement about the physical makeup of human beings, it explains the universality of death intellectually by appealing to the notion of the inevitable decay of matter; at the same time, in confronting the meditating reader with the truth of her physical being—her body is vile matter subject to rot and decay—it elicits feelings of revulsion which may be processed into the disposition of humility. The biblical proof text for the maxim is God’s curse on Adam for his disobedience: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou return to the earth out of which thou wast taken: for dust thou art, and into dust thou shalt return” (Gn 3:19). Gerard collects scriptures and authorities containing some version of the formula “dust to dust” or its alternative “earth to earth”¹²⁶ and connects them in an argument which presents the mortal condition of the human species since Adam’s fall as reason to be humble: “Therefore who will not be afraid and humble himself, since he knows for certain that he must die presently and return to earth? For there will be no excepting of persons, but it will be just as it was in the beginning, for it is written in the second Book of Kings in ¹²⁵ Gerard, Cordiale, fol. 38v: “Nam commune mori” (authorial); fol. 41v: “Omnia mors delet, omnia morte cadunt” (Vital of Blois); fol. 42r: “Omnis homo terra et cinis” (Sir 17:31); fol. 37v: “Agnoscat homo se mortalem et frangat elationem” (Augustine). Rhetoricians from Aristotle onwards have considered sententiae to be suitable for deployment either as premises or as conclusions in an enthymeme, a simplified form of dialectical syllogism adapted to making rhetorical arguments about practical subjects: Aristotle, Ars rhetorica 2.21 [1394a], trans. Freese, 278–9; Quintilian, Institutio 8.5.4, trans. Butler, 3:282–3; see also Lausberg, Handbuch, sections 371, 875. ¹²⁶ The reason for the alternation is that the Old Latin Bible reads terra, “earth,” in Gn 3:19 where Jerome’s later Vulgate translation has pulvis, “dust”; because authors such as Augustine and even Jerome often quoted the Bible in the Old Latin translation in their own writings, both versions remained current in the Middle Ages.

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the fourteenth chapter [2 Sm 14:14]: ‘We all die, and like waters that return no more, we fall down into the earth.’ ”¹²⁷ As the demonstration proceeds, Gerard accumulates citations that repeat and vary the terms of the maxim: human beings are earth, soil, and slime; once dead their bodies will be dust, embers, and ashes. The repetition facilitates a conceptual grasp of death as the inevitable reversion of bodies to their original element; this understanding of the body as vile matter destined for putrescence simultaneously disgusts and ultimately humbles the reader who, as she mentally iterates the sentence “All men are earth and ashes” along with its implicature “All humans are mortal,” is obliged to acknowledge her own condition as a mortal creature fashioned from earth and slime, whose only end will be to join those already moldering in their graves: [John] Chrysostom says in his book On the Reparation of the Lapse: “What did it profit those who remained in bodily excess and the pleasures of this life to their very last day? Examine their sepulchers, . . . step up to each one’s grave. See only ashes and the foul remains of worms, and remember that this is the body’s end. . . . ” Bernard says in his Meditations: “ . . . Nothing has remained of the lovers of this world but ashes and worms. Mark carefully what they were: they were men, just like you . . . Whatever happened to them can happen to you also, for you are a man, a man from soil [homo de humo] and slime from slime. You are of earth, you live from earth, and to earth you shall return.” Item dicit Crisostomus in libello de reparacione lapsi: Quid profuit illis qui in luxuria corporis et presentis vite voluptatibus usque ad diem ultimum permanserunt? Intuere nunc sepulchra eorum . . . Accede propius ad singulorum sepulchra, vide cineres solos et fetidas vermium reliquias, et recordare [h]unc corporum esse finem. . . . Item Bernardus in suis Meditationibus sic inquit: . . . Nichil ex eis [sc. amatores mundi] remansit nisi cineres et vermes. Attende dilgenter quid sunt, quid fuerunt. Homines fuerunt sicut tu . . . quidquid illis accidit tibi accidere potest, quia homo es, homo de humo et limus de limo. De terra es, de terra vivis, et in terram reverteris.¹²⁸

The inclusion of the etymology of homo is anything but gratuitous. It performs a linguistic reduction (in the sense of a “leading back”) which parallels the physical reduction alluded to in the “earth to earth” maxims. Just as in nature death reduces every human being to the inert element from which she was made, so ¹²⁷ Gerard, Cordiale, fol. 38r: “Quis ergo non timebit et se humiliabit cum certissime scit se iam [moriturum et] in terram reversurum. Nulla enim erit personarum exceptio sicud nec fuit ab initio, nam ut scribitur [II] Regum xiiiio: Omnes morimur et quasi aque dilabimur in terram que non revertuntur.” ¹²⁸ Gerard, Cordiale, fol. 39r–v. Cf. John Chrysostom, De reparatione lapsi [title of the Latin translation of John’s Letter to Theodore after his Fall] 9, ed. Dumortier, 278; Ps.-Bernard, Meditationes piissimae 3.9–10, PL 184:491a–c.

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too etymology leads the word for “man,” homo, back to its root in the word for “soil” or “earth,” humus.¹²⁹ Humus is moreover the root of humilitas, “humility,” the disposition that this particular meditation on death is supposed to inculcate in the reader, and the other words related to it: humilis, literally “situated on the ground,” hence “lowly, humble,” humiliare, “to make low, abase, divest of pride.” Thus the intended product of meditation effects a further reduction, a leading back of the proudful meditator to her ground in abjectness. The remarkable parallelization of content, language, and outcome, which endows the meditation with a high degree of consistency and attunement, is exploited to the full by Gerard in the latter sections of the discourse on death and humility. Here the concentration of “earth to earth” statements is at its densest, and the reader is addressed directly: Therefore attend to and consider the beginning of your life, and also its middle and end or termination, and you will find the greatest opportunity and cause for humbling yourself. Whatever you think, or say, or make of yourself: are you not dust and earth? For it is written in Ecclesiastes in the twelfth chapter [verse 7]: “[Before] the dust return into its earth, from whence it was,” into earth most vile, into putrid earth filled with worms. Job chapter seventeen [verse 14]: “I have said to rottenness: Thou art my father; to worms, my mother and my sister.” Likewise Sirach chapter seventeen [verse 31]: “All men are earth and ashes,” and Genesis chapter three [verse 19]: “Till thou return to the earth out of which thou wast taken: for dust thou art, and into dust thou shalt return.” Attende igitur et vide principium vite tue, et medium ac finem sive terminum, et invenies maximam occasionem et causam temetipsum humiliandi. Quid cogitas, quid dicis, quid teipsum facis: nonne pulvis es et terra? Scriptum enim Eccles. xiio: Revertatur pulvis in terram suam unde erat. In terram vilissimam in terram putridam vermibus repletam. Job [xvii]o: Putredini dixi pater meus es, mater mea et soror mea vermibus. Item Ecclesias. xviio: Ommis homo terra et cinis. Et Genesis iiio: Reverteris in terram de qua sumptus es, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris.¹³⁰

The discourse ends with a peroration quoting mainly from the commentary on the Book of Job by Peter of Blois (ca. 1130–ca. 1211). Commenting on a verse from Jeremiah (22:29: “O earth, earth, earth, hear the words of the Lord”), Peter explains that

¹²⁹ The etymology was standard in the Middle Ages, because it had the authority of Isidore of Seville behind it; see Etymologiae 1.29.3, 10.1, ed. Lindsay. ¹³⁰ Gerard, Cordiale, fol. 42r.

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[Jeremiah] calls man “earth” three times, because man may be called “earth” in three ways. He is earth, because he is created from earth; his conversation is on the earth; at the end he returns and is changed to earth. He is earth by his creation, his conversation, and his death. Earth is his nature, his life, his grave. He tastes earth, he licks earth, he thirsts for and desires earth. “His belly is cemented fast to the earth.” [Ps 43:25, Gallican Psalter]. He goes down to the lower depths of the earth, having forgotten celestial things; he goes to law over earth, fights over earth, sails the seas for the sake of earth, circles and goes about the earth for the sake of earth, and for the sake of earth wretched man, full of fears, labors more frequently, hither and thither, never ceasing from such labors until he, who was made from earth, reverts to his primal matter, namely earth, saying these words from the second chapter of the Third Book of Kings [1 Kgs 2:2]: “I am going the way of all earth”. And therefore: “Since we are but dregs and slime, the vilest thing of all, Why should we, who earth to earth revert, walk tall?” Ter vocat hominem terram, nam tripliciter potest homo dici terra. Est enim terra, quia de terra creatur, in terra conversatur, et finaliter in terram redit et mutatur. Terra est creatione, conversatione et morte. Terra est natura, vita et sepultura. Nam sapit terram, lingit terram, sitit et concupiscit. Conglutinatus est in terra venter eius. Descendit in inferiora terre celestium oblitus. Pro terra litigat, pro terra pugnat, pro terra mare navigat, pro terra terram circuit et perambulat et sepius pro terra [nunc huc] nunc illuc homo miserabilis anxius laborat: nec a talibus cessat, donec qui de terra sumptus est revertitur in materiam primam videlicet in terram, dicens illud III Regum iio: Ecce ingredior viam universe terre. Et ideo: Cum fex, cum limus, cum res vilissima simus, Unde superbimus, [qui] ad terram terra redimus?¹³¹

The claim of the sententia “All humans are mortal” to state a universal truth about the human condition is reinforced by the absence of viable counterexamples—of examples, in other words, of people who did not die. This lack is made palpable for the meditating reader through the repeated posing of a question: Ubi sunt?, “Where are they?” The question was asked in the Bible and in homilies on human mortality; the answer was invariably: “They are not in this world.” The question and answer, which in combination were a literary and homiletic topos, always refer to historical examples, whether named individuals or generic classes of accomplished and influential persons;¹³² these examples, which can be and usually are multiplied, point to the truth of the maxim “All humans are mortal,” or some variant of it, which is hence implicitly iterated with ¹³¹ Ibid., fol. 43r. Cf. Peter of Blois, Compendium in Job 1, PL 207:810b. The concluding rhyme is proverbial; see Thesaurus Proverbiorum Medii Aevi 2:294, nos. 145–8. ¹³² On the topos, see Gilson, “De la Bible à François Villon”; Friedman, “Ubi Sunt”; Liborio, “Ubi sunt”; Di Sciacca, Finding the Right Words, 105–48.

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each new act of exemplification. Yet although the examples always point to the same brute fact of mortality, the answer to the question “Where are they?” is capable of bringing into focus more than one aspect of a person’s no longer being in the world; the whole range of possibility is reflected in the scriptures and authorities that Gerard quotes in the Cordiale. The answer may, in keeping with the interrogative where?, be strictly locative: the dead are not here, among the living, but in their graves (a location which permits combination with “earth to earth” statements), or even in hell. “Therefore Prosper says in his Sentences: ‘Where are the insuperable orators? Where are the men who appointed festivals most agreeably? Where are the splendid keepers of horses? Where are the commanders of armies? Where are the satraps and the tyrants? Are they not all dust and ashes? . . . Inspect their sepulchers.’ ”¹³³ “Likewise Baruch chapter three [verses 16–19]: ‘Where are the princes of the nations, and they that rule over the beasts that are upon the earth? . . . They are cut off, and are gone down to hell, and others are risen up in their place.’ ”¹³⁴ “Likewise Bernard says in his Meditations: ‘Tell me, where are the lovers of this world who were in our midst but a short time ago? . . . They spent their days in wealth, and in a moment they went down to hell’ [Jb 21:13].”¹³⁵ On the other hand, the answer may state not where the formerly high and mighty ones now are, but what happened to them: they passed. “Whence Isidore says in one of his homilies: ‘Most dearly beloved, . . . where are the kings, the princes, the emperors? Where are the wealthy in possessions, the powerful, the rich men of the world? They have passed like a shadow, and vanished like a dream.’ ”¹³⁶ “Of the rich and exalted man it is written thus in the twentieth chapter of Job [verses 7–8]: . . . ‘They that had seen him shall say: Where is he? As a dream that fleeth away he shall not be found, he shall pass as a vision of the night.’ ”¹³⁷ Strictly speaking, the similes qualify the verbs, underlining their perfective aspect: the event of passing is complete to the point that nothing remains behind, just as a dream, a vision, or a shadow disappears without leaving any trace. Implicitly, however, the similes also characterize the human subjects of ¹³³ Gerard, Cordiale, fol. 39r: “Unde Prosper in suis sentenciis sic ait: Ubi sunt insuperabiles oratores, ubi qui convenientius festa disponebant? Ubi equorum splendidi nutritores, ubi exercitium duces? Ubi satrape et tyranni? Nonne omnia pulvis et faville? . . . Respice sepulchra.” Cf. Prosper of Aquitaine, Sententiae ex Augustini operibus delibatae 392, ed. Gastaldo, 364. ¹³⁴ Gerard, Cordiale, fol. 39r: “Item Baruch iiio: Ubi sunt principes gentium [et] qui dominantur super bestias que sunt super terram? . . . exterminati enim sunt et ad inferos descenderunt.” ¹³⁵ Gerard, Cordiale, fol. 39v: “Item Bernardus in suis meditationibus sic inquit: Dic michi ubi sunt amatores mundi qui ante pauca tempora nobiscum erant? . . . duxerunt in bonis dies suos et in puncto ad inferna descenderunt.” Cf. Pseudo-Bernard of Clairvaux, Meditationes piissimi de cognitio humanae conditionis 3.9–10, PL 184:491a–c. ¹³⁶ Gerard, Cordiale, fol. 41r: “Dilectissimi . . . Ubi sunt reges? Ubi principes? Ubi imperatores? Ubi rerum locupletes? Ubi potentes seculi? Ubi divites mundi? Quasi umbra transierunt et velud sompnium evanuerunt.” Cf. Isidore of Seville, Synonyma 2.91, ed. Elfassi, 138. This work was widely circulated, epitomized, and exploited in homilies in the Middle Ages; see Di Sciacca, Finding the Right Words. ¹³⁷ Gerard, Cordiale, fol. 39r: “Unde Job xxo sic scribitur de divite et elato . . . Qui eum viderant dicent: ubi est? velud sompn[i]um avolans non invenietur, transiet sicud visio nocturna.”

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the verbs, and give an answer to the question Ubi sunt? that tells neither where these famous men now are, nor what happened to them, but what they were when still in this world: they were fleeting and impermanent. Collectively, these various aspects of no longer being in the world bring different kinds of disjunction into play, which readers of the Cordiale must work through conceptually in their meditations. In doing so, they achieve an all-round understanding of the nature of earthly existence in the horizons of death and eternity. First, there is the spatial disjunction, between “here in this world” and “elsewhere.” Its consideration leads to an appreciation of earth as an impermanent abode, or place of exile. During his time in this world, according to an unnamed philosopher who answered Emperor Hadrian’s questions about the human condition, “Man is a slave unto death, a stranger in the place, a traveler passing through.”¹³⁸ Second, there is the temporal disjunction, between “at one time” and “no longer.” This allows the reader to form a conception of earthly life’s brevity; once again, the concept is clothed in metaphors and similes which allow it to be grasped through concrete particulars. “Man is like a heap of snow, a rose in full bloom, a new apple,” says the same philosopher; “Man’s days are like grass, as the flower of the field, so shall he flourish” (Ps 102:15); “All flesh is grass, and all the glory thereof as the flower of the field” (Is 40:6).¹³⁹ Finally, there is the phenomenal disjunction, between the appearance of things and the reality. Its consideration yields an understanding of earthly reputation amassed from the fruits of human endeavor as sham. The great men of history, who gave the appearance of magnificence and splendor, were in actual fact no more enduring or permanent than a shadow, and any pride they took in themselves and their accomplishments was short lived. “If his pride mount up even to heaven, and his head touch the clouds, in the end he shall be destroyed like a dunghill, and they that had seen him shall say: Where is he?” (Jb 20:6–7); “His glory is dung and worms; today he is lifted up, and tomorrow he shall not be found” (1 Mc 2:62–3).¹⁴⁰ The grave is the great leveler of rank and distinction; the Ubi sunt? passage from Prosper of Aquitaine that admonishes the reader to “inspect the sepulchers” of the ¹³⁸ Gerard, Cordiale, fol. 38v: “Quod etiam clare patet secundum philosophum qui Adriano imperatori de essentia et statu hominis interroganti taliter respondit: Homo est mancipium mortis, hospes loci, viator transiens.” The philosopher who answered Hadrian’s question was identified as Epictetus in a dialogue tradition which goes back to the second or third century ; according to yet another tradition, the question Quid est homo? was asked by Pippin and answered by Alcuin. See Daly and Suchier, Altercatio Hadriani Augusti. ¹³⁹ Gerard, Cordiale, fol. 38v: “Homo est . . . similis acervo nivis, rose mature atque pomo novo.” The similes belong to the philosophical dialogues referred to in the previous note. Fol. 41v: “Homo sicud fenum dies eius tamquam flos agri sic efflorebit . . . Omnis caro fenum et omnis gloria eius quasi flos agri.” The Psalm is cited in the version of the Gallican Psalter. ¹⁴⁰ Gerard, Cordiale, fol. 39r: “Si ascenderit usque ad celum superbia eius, et caput eius nubes tetigerit, quasi sterquilineum in fine perdetur, et qui eum viderant dicent ubi est?” Fol. 40v: “Gloria eius stercus et vermis, hodie extollitur et cras non invenietur.”

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dead continues: “See: who is the servant and who the master, which one the rich man and which one poor? Tell the difference between the vanquished and the overlord if you can.”¹⁴¹ It is therefore appropriate that the topos that brings this equalizing power of the grave into focus should also be a leveler, in this case of claims to speak with authority. Since they are commonplaces, the question “Where are they?” and its variant answers “Not here,” “They passed,” “Their being was impermanent” are available for anyone and everyone to utter, not just the canonical authorities of Christian tradition. The Ubi sunt? passage that Gerard has excerpted from Isidore’s Homilies reads in full: “Dearest beloved, we must consider how short lived earthly happiness is, how limited the glory of this world, how perishable and fragile worldly power. Let every person possible say: Where are the kings, the princes, the emperors?”¹⁴² Isidore draws attention to the fact that his words could be spoken by anyone, and the discourse of the Cordiale puts this principle of the commonplace into action by realizing the Ubi sunt? topos in a combination of voices that mingles named biblical authorities with the voice of the anonymous author: “Hence Isaiah says in the thirty-third chapter [verse 18]: ‘Where is the learned? Where is he that pondered the words of the law? Where is the teacher of little ones?’ as if he were saying” (this signals the switch to the author Gerard’s own words) “They are not, nor do they live, but have passed on the same journey as others.”¹⁴³ “Where,” asks the authorial voice, “is Hector, where is Julius [Caesar], where is the all-powerful Alexander? Where is Judas Maccabeus, and where is Samson with his great strength? Where is Croesus, who was most wealthy? Where is Absolom, the fairest? Where is Galen the physician, and his fellow Avicenna? Where is Solomon the all-wise? Where is Cicero, and where is Aristotle, that most expert of men? Where is Plato? Where is Porphyry? Where is Virgil, most learned poet of them all?” The responses are in the voices of King David and Job: “As it says in the Psalm [38:7], ‘Man passeth as an image.’ . . . Concerning the rich and exalted man it is written thus in the twentieth chapter of Job [verses 7–8]: ‘ . . . Where is he? As a dream that fleeth away he shall not be found, he shall pass as a vision of the night.’ ”¹⁴⁴ The reader tracking these ¹⁴¹ Ibid., fol. 39r: “Respice sepulchra et vide quis servus quis dominus, quis dives quis pauper. Discerne si potes victum a rege.” ¹⁴² Ibid., fol. 41r: “Unde Ysidorus in omelia: Dilectissimi pensare debemus quam brevis est mundi felicitas, quam modica est huius seculi gloria, quam caduca et fragilis est temporalis potentia. Dicat qui poterit ubi sunt reges, ubi principes, ubi imperatores?” For the Isidore reference, see note 136 to this chapter. ¹⁴³ Gerard, Cordiale, fol. 38r–v: “Unde Isaye xxxiiio: Ubi est litteratus, ubi est legis [verba] ponderans, ubi doctor parvulorum? Quasi diceret: Non sunt neque vivunt, sed eodem cursu cum aliis transierunt.” ¹⁴⁴ Ibid., fols. 38v–39r: “Di[c] michi tu ubi Hector, ubi Julius, ubi Alexander potentissimus? Ubi Judas Machabeus et Samson fortis viribus? Ubi [C]res[u]s ditissimus? Ubi Absolon pulcherrimus? Ubi Galienus medicus et Avicenna eius socius? Ubi Salomon sapientissimus? Ubi Tul[l]ius, ubi Aristoteles peritissimus? Ubi Plato, ubi Porphirius? Ubi doctissimus poetarum Virgilius? . . . In ymagine pertransit homo . . . Unde Job xxo sic scribitur de divite et elato: . . . ubi est? velud sompn[i]um avolans non invenietur, transiet sicud visio nocturna.” The text of Ps 38:7 is from the Gallican Psalter.

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changes of voice experiences the discourse of the text as a graveyard of authority: a site where the voices of Isaiah, Job, David, Baruch, Isidore, Prosper, and John Chrysostom are mixed indiscriminately with the voice of everyone, a site where the voice that asserts its authority (“I tell you that even the most exceptional men are mortal like the rest of us”) simultaneously envisages its own leveling in the commonplace utterance and the common earth from which all are made and to which all shall return. Of the four last things treated by the Cordiale, death is the only one that occurs in this world. Hence it is amenable to rhetorical treatment in the modes of sententiousness and exemplarity—forms of proof which appeal to the audience’s experience and knowledge of the world. “All humans are mortal” is a universal maxim relating to the human condition on this side of eternity, and it is corroborated by human experience and knowledge, which fail to provide any compelling evidence to the contrary: that is the point of the welter of examples produced in the course of the repeated citations of the Ubi sunt? topos. When it comes to the other last things, however, these ought in principle to be completely beyond the reach of exemplary or sententious demonstration. The last judgment, the torments of hell, and the joys of heaven are not immanent, but transcendent; epistemologically speaking they are, as Gregory the Great explained in the preface to his famous discussion of the afterlife in the fourth and last book of his Dialogues, not things we know by experience (scire per experimentum), but things we must believe (credere) out of faith.¹⁴⁵ Despite the obstacles, however, Gerard succeeds in bringing these transcendent objects of faith within the scope of sententious and exemplary discourse. One way in which he manages this is by insinuating that immanence and transcendence are scalar values. At one end of the scale is the absolute immanence of the death of the body; at the other extreme is the absolute transcendence of heaven, whose joys are said to be wholly beyond the capacity of human speech to put into words or human reason to comprehend: “Gregory says in a Homily, ‘What tongue is capable of saying, what intellect able to grasp how many joys of the celestial city are present to the choirs of angels and souls of the blessed?’ ”¹⁴⁶ Ranged in between the extremes are the last judgment and hell. The former, Gerard suggests, may be understood on the analogy of an earthly court of law. Its proceedings follow the same sequence of accusation, defense, and sentence (these are the themes, in that order, of the three discourses on hell); Gerard makes an explicit appeal to his readers’ experience of the administration of justice in this world when he asks them to consider how much care they would have to give to

¹⁴⁵ Gregory the Great, Dialogi 4.1–6, ed. Moricca, 229–39. ¹⁴⁶ Gerard, Cordiale, fols. 87v–88r: “Unde Gregorius in Omelia [Gregory the Great, Homeliae in Evangelia 37.1, ed. Étaix, 348]: Que lingua dicere vel quis intellectus capere sufficit illa superne civitatis quanta sint gaudia angelorum choris interesse cum beatissimis spiritibus?”

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accounting for a sum of money before a temporal judge, and how the same care and attention will be all the more necessary when they come to face the divine judge.¹⁴⁷ The difference between immanence and transcendence in this case is one of degree: except for the fact that its inquisitions are more thoroughgoing and its sentences more severe, the machinery of divine justice operates like any worldly assize. When it comes to hell, it is not the thing itself that is analogizable, but our epistemological access to it. Declaring the eternal duration of infernal punishment to be beyond human understanding or language, Gerard asks his reader to consider an enormous lump of sandstone, “as great as may be contained in the concavity of the eighth sphere,” as great, in other words, as may be enclosed by the firmament; the reader should next suppose that this vast stone decreases in size at the rate of one tiny grain of sand every million years; the time it would take for the stone to be reduced to nothing still comes nowhere near to providing an adequate measure of eternity, because (Gerard misquotes Aristotle’s Physics) “there is no ratio in the relation of the finite to the infinite.”¹⁴⁸ Although the analogy fails to convey so much as an approximate concept of eternity (and indeed is deliberately set up to fail in this regard), it does succeed to the extent that it affords the reader an experience of what it is like to be unable to form any concept of eternity. In this more limited fashion, the thought-experiment of the sandstone still manages to bring aspects of transcendence, namely its incommensurability and unknowability, within the reach of experience. The other way in which Gerard makes judgment, hell, and heaven amenable to sententious and exemplary discourse is to suggest that, notwithstanding their transcendence, there is a fund of relevant human experience from which valid maxims and examples may be drawn. Gregory, who declared the last things to be objects of belief rather than empirical knowledge, argued that belief nevertheless receives support from experience. The experience in question is normally not the believer’s own, but the vicarious experience of certain select individuals to whom

¹⁴⁷ Gerard, Cordiale, fol. 53v: “Karissime, si esses rationem redditurus mille florenorum coram domino temporali iusto prudenti et severo, multum deberes sollicitari pro bona computatione facienda. Sis ergo multomagis sollicita[ns] vigilans et timoratus pro reddenda ratione de commissis et omissis coram deo et angelis et omnibus sanctis eius quibus tunc presentibus et astantibus te necessario oportebit computare.” (Dearest beloved, if you were to account for a thousand florins before a worldly lord who is just, wise, and strict, you should have to take great care to give a good reckoning. Be therefore far more careful, vigilant, and fearful when accounting for your deeds and omissions before God and all his angels and saints who will be present and in attendance and to whom you will have to give a reckoning.) For the headings of the three discourses on the last judgment, see the overview of the contents of the Cordiale in note 114 to this chapter; they appear to be modeled on Humbert of Romans, De dono timoris 6, ed. Boyer, 118, 129, 141, who lists “multitudo accusatorum,” “rationis reditio,” and “sententie expectatio” among the terrors of the last judgment. ¹⁴⁸ Gerard, Cordiale, fol. 81r: “nam finiti ad infinitum nulla est proportio.” The passage of Aristotle in question states that “the unlimited bears no proportion to the unlimited” (to d’apeiron pros to apeiron oudena logon echei; Physics, 8.1 [252a], trans. Wicksteed and Cornford, 2:280–1). The image of the grain of sand may derive from Sir 18:10: “As a pebble of the sand, so are a few years compared to eternity.”

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divine grace has granted visions of the life to come. Gregory begins his treatment of the last things in the Dialogues with the assertion that ever since Adam was expelled from paradise, the human race has been cut off from direct intercourse with God and his angels; the transcendence that Adam was able to witness at first hand, and could still recollect even after his fall, is something that humankind has subsequently had to take on faith. The argument continues: recognizing that humans often struggle to believe, the Holy Spirit granted to some of our ancestors an experience (experimentum) of the invisible realms of the hereafter; this experience has subsequently been communicated in reports (dicta) for the fortification of the faith of others.¹⁴⁹ In order to insinuate, first, that something really does exist beyond the reach of natural human cognition and, second, that skeptics ought to believe the authoritative testimony of those select few who were able to experience these things at first hand, Gregory narrates a concrete analogy: a mother imprisoned in a dark cell gives birth to a child there, whom she tells about the sun, moon, stars, and other features of the world outside; although the child has no experience of any of this, it would be foolish (stultus), Gregory reasons, to suppose its mother was lying.¹⁵⁰ This analogy, along with the account of human cognitive limits since the Fall, forms the epistemological preamble to the main contents of the fourth book of the Dialogues, which is a collection of examples and anecdotes concerning individuals who were graced with visions of some or other aspect of the life to come: the soul’s departure from the body and what awaits it immediately after death, the purgatorial fire, eternal punishment in hell.¹⁵¹ The Cordiale draws on this fund of special experience (and, via the mediation of Humbert of Romans, often on Gregory’s Dialogues) as a source of examples to back up its maxims about judgment and hell. The maxim iterated in the discourses on Doomsday is “The last judgment is to be feared.” This proposition features in all three chapter titles, each one focusing on a different reason to be afraid: “because of the manifold charges that will be laid against us”; “because of the account we shall have to give of ourselves”; “because of the pronouncement of the sentence.” In the case of hell, the maxim is “Mortification is to be accepted in this life,” and the three discourses again provide reasons, this time by detailing the multifarious terrors that await the sinner who has failed to accept mortification: “The diverse names of the places of hell”; “The diverse afflictions imposed by hell’s companions”; “The diverse condition of hell’s torments.”¹⁵² All of these reasons, those pertaining to Doomsday as well as those relating to hell, transcend ordinary human knowledge and experience; in order to provide them with an empirical foundation nevertheless, Gerard narrates exemplary stories about individuals who ¹⁴⁹ Gregory, Dialogi 4.1–5, ed. Moricca, 229–38. ¹⁵⁰ Ibid. 4.1, ed. Moricca, 230. ¹⁵¹ Many of the same stories also appear in Gregory’s Gospel Homilies, which were probably delivered in 590–1, just before the composition of the Dialogues in 593–4; on the dates and the shared material, see Gregory, Dialogues, ed. Vogüé, 1:25–30. ¹⁵² See note 114 to this chapter for the chapter rubrics of Cordiale Parts 2 and 3.

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had visions of demons, judgment, and eternal damnation: the holy man who conversed with a demon who had been tempting him to fornication;¹⁵³ the monk who was paralyzed by fear after a nocturnal vision of the devil;¹⁵⁴ a rich and pleasure-loving man by the name of Chrysaurius who was terrified on his sickbed by the vision of a host of hideous demons;¹⁵⁵ two monks, one called Theodorus and the other an unnamed brother in the monastery of Ton Galathon, who each had visions of being delivered up to a dragon that wanted to devour them;¹⁵⁶ the old man who saw demons swarming around men like bees;¹⁵⁷ the hermit Peter, who spent his life in fasting and penance after his soul was sent into hell to see the burning fires there;¹⁵⁸ the knight who, after a similar vision, fled to a hermitage and mortified himself for the rest of his days by jumping first into a freezing river in the depths of winter wearing all his clothes and then, when his clothes had frozen to his flesh, into a bath filled with water as hot as he could stand.¹⁵⁹ These examples are intermingled with stories of individuals who did not witness the terrors of judgment and hell at first hand, but were mindful of them and adopted the appropriate habitus of fear and self-mortification: the abbot Agathon who, although he was virtuous and upright, confessed to his brothers on his deathbed that he feared God’s judgment;¹⁶⁰ the old man who lived in dread of the soul’s separation from the body, its appearance before the judge, and the judge’s sentence;¹⁶¹ the delicate young Dominican who, in reply to the kinsman who was trying to convince him to leave the order, declared that he would sooner suffer the asperities of his chosen way of life than submit to the eternal punishments of hell;¹⁶² the hermit who, when asked why he inflicted such extremes of mortification on himself, responded that “All the labor of my life is not fit to be compared with a single day of the torments that are reserved for sinners in the world to

¹⁵³ Gerard, Cordiale, fols. 61v–62r. The anecdote is attributed to the Vitae Patrum but its source is unidentified; see Cordyal, ed. Mulders, 194. ¹⁵⁴ Gerard, Cordiale, fol. 72r–v. Cf. Humbert, De dono timoris 4, ed. Boyer, 60. ¹⁵⁵ Gerard, Cordiale, fol. 72v. Cf. Gregory, Dialogi 4.40, ed. Moricca, 293–4; Humbert, De dono timoris 4, ed. Boyer, 60. The example is also in Humbert’s principal source, Stephen of Bourbon, Tractatus de diversis materiis predicabilibus 1.4, ed. Berlioz and Eichenlaub, 1:101–2. Whether Gerard resorted independently to this work too remains to be determined; cf. De veer utersten, ed. Dusch, 26*. ¹⁵⁶ Gerard, Cordiale, fols. 73v–74v. Cf. Gregory, Dialogi 4.40, ed. Moricca, 292–3, 295; Stephen of Bourbon, Tractatus 1.4, ed. Berlioz and Eichenlaub, 1:102–3; Humbert, De dono timoris 4, ed. Boyer, 61. ¹⁵⁷ Gerard, Cordiale, fols. 74v–75r. Cf. Vitae Patrum 6, Verba seniorum 1.11, PL 73:994c. ¹⁵⁸ Gerard, Cordiale, fol. 76v. Cf. Gregory, Dialogi 4.37, ed. Moricca, 285–6; Stephen of Bourbon, Tractatus 1.4, ed. Berlioz and Eichenlaub, 1:93; Humbert, De dono timoris 4, ed. Boyer, 54–5. ¹⁵⁹ Gerard, Cordiale, fol. 78v. Cf. Bede, Ecclesiastical History 5.12, ed. Colgrave and Mynors, 488–98; Stephen of Bourbon, Tractatus 1.1, ed. Berlioz and Eichenlaub, 1:22–3; Humbert, De dono timoris 1, ed. Boyer, 15. ¹⁶⁰ Gerard, Cordiale, fol. 58v. Cf. Vitae Patrum 3, Verba seniorum 161, PL 73:793c; James of Voragine, Legenda aurea 175, ed. Maggioni, 1236–7; Humbert, De dono timoris 1, ed. Boyer, 25. ¹⁶¹ Gerard, Cordiale, fol. 59r. Cf. Humbert, De dono timoris 1, ed. Boyer, 26. ¹⁶² Gerard, Cordiale, fol. 76v. Cf. Humbert, De dono timoris 4, ed. Boyer, 53.

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come”;¹⁶³ the jongleur Folquet of Marseilles who, mindful of the eternity of suffering in hell, abandoned his worldly life to become a monk and subsequently Archbishop of Toulouse;¹⁶⁴ the novice monk who would not adapt to the discipline of the cell until his abbot instructed him to consider how much worse he would like it if he were confined to purgatory or hell.¹⁶⁵ The combination of the two kinds of example insinuates a connection and even a continuity between the epistemic and the empirical: what one person believes in true faith has actually been experienced by another. This connection makes it possible for the reader of the Cordiale to include herself in the multiple of examples and thereby recognize that the maxims (the last judgment is to be feared; suffering in this life is to be accepted willingly) apply in her case also. Although a reader might in theory be able to name further examples of individuals who had visions of the hereafter, it is unlikely that she would be able to count herself among their number, either actually or potentially; she can, on the other hand, add herself to the multiple of examples of people who believed in the terrifying reality of the last judgment and the everlasting duration of punishment in hell, by choosing to believe these things herself and modifying her behavior accordingly. In conforming herself to these exemplary attitudes, the reader gives a proof of her faith, for which, moreover, she can claim a basis in the authoritative special experience of others. Thus, an immanent and observable phenomenon, the comportment of humans in respect of the last things, is made to function as the trace and proof of transcendent and normally unobservable facts: that divine judgment really is terrible, and that the punishments of hell truly are so multifarious and unremitting as to make worldly suffering seem trivial by comparison. In the case of heaven, the maxim iterated at the beginning of each of the three discourses is that “The celestial kingdom is to be commended,” for different reasons that are specified in turn: “on account of its beauty,” “on account of the abundance of all good things there,” “on account of its exceeding and unchanging delight.”¹⁶⁶ These discourses stand out because they are devoid of examples—until the third and final discourse where, as will be seen, exemplarity resumes, but ¹⁶³ Gerard, Cordiale, fol. 78v: “Totus labor vite mee non est ydoneus comparari ad unum diem tormentorum que peccatoribus in futuro seculo reservantur.” Cf. Vitae Patrum 5, Verba seniorum 7.25, PL 73:900a; Stephen of Bourbon, Tractatus 1.4, ed. Berlioz and Eichenlaub, 1:93; Humbert, De dono timoris 4, ed. Boyer, 54. ¹⁶⁴ Gerard, Cordiale, fol. 82r. Cf. Stephen of Bourbon, Tractatus 1.4, ed. Berlioz and Eichenlaub, 1:85; Humbert, De dono timoris 4, ed. Boyer, 52. ¹⁶⁵ Gerard, Cordiale, fol. 82v. Cf. Vitae Patrum 5, Verba seniorum 7.28, PL 73:900c; Humbert, De dono timoris 4, ed. Boyer, 81–2. ¹⁶⁶ The opening sentences of the discourses in sequence are: “In primis igitur regnum dei commendatur a summa pulchritudine sive claritate” (Gerard, Cordiale, fol. 84v; In the first place God’s kingdom is to be recommended for its sovereign beauty or brightness); “Regnum celeste secundo commendatur a bonorum omnium copiositate” (ibid., fol. 85v; In the second place the heavenly kingdom is to be recommended for its abundance of all good things); “Postremo regnum dei commendatur a maxima leticia iugiter durante in eternitate” (ibid., fol. 87v; Lastly God’s kingdom is to be recommended for its supremely great joy perpetually lasting for eternity).

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rapidly succumbs to a malfunction which lays bare the operations of iteration and multiplication that underlie the text’s discursive production as well as its meditative application. The paucity of examples may be explained by the fact that Gerard’s main resource for this kind of material, Humbert of Romans’ De dono timoris, does not cover the topic of heaven; it also reflects the utterly transcendent status of the celestial kingdom, whose joys are said to be beyond human powers of understanding and language, and thus beyond the sources and expressive medium of exemplarity.¹⁶⁷ Examples nonetheless make a reappearance in the discourse at the point where the author is expounding the principle that everlasting enjoyment in heaven is predicated upon renunciation in this life: “The saints come to these joys not by chance but by great labors”; “It is impossible to enjoy the goods of both the present life and that which is to come”; “We cannot serve God and Mammon.”¹⁶⁸ Gerard’s first example is Balaam, who expressed the desire for eternal glory (Nm 23:10: “Let my soul die the death of the just, and my last end be like to them”), but shunned the pains and labors by which it is earned;¹⁶⁹ next comes the New Testament parable of the rich man and Lazarus, cited in a compact paraphrase that focuses on the rich man’s fate in the afterlife: “A rich man feasted sumptuously every day here, clothed in purple and fine linen, but when he was dead and in the place of torments he soon came to feel what he would not believe from Moses.”¹⁷⁰ At this juncture, the discourse of exemplarity stalls. Instead of proceeding to multiply instances of worldly individuals who experienced a drastic reversal of their fortunes in the afterlife, it iterates the same example, by citing further authorities who refer to the parable. Bernard of Clairvaux (actually his secretary

¹⁶⁷ The author of the “second collection” of supplementary examples to the Cordiale (see note 122 to this chapter) evidently faced the same problem. Around half of the exempla appended to the fourth and final book are not examples at all, but quotations from patristic writers taken straight from the main text which they are meant to supplement. Included among them are Gregory the Great’s words about heaven surpassing all human language and understanding—the very statement that establishes the sheer transcendence of the phenomenon, which is by definition unexampled. See above, 198 with note 146. ¹⁶⁸ Gerard, Cordiale, fol. 91v: “per magnos ista [sc. gaudia] labores sanctis acquiri nec fortuitu reperiri”; fol. 92v: “impossibile est ut et presentibus quis fruatur bonis et futuris [Jerome, letter 118.6.3, Epistulae, ed. Hilberg, 2:444] . . . Non possumus deo servire et mammone [Mt 6:24].” ¹⁶⁹ Gerard, Cordiale, fols. 91v–92r: “Talis erat Balaan ariolus qui considerans castra filiorum Israhel et intelligens eterne beatitudinis repromissionem eis a domino factam dicebat: Moriatur anima mea morte iustorum et fiant novissima mea horum similia [Nm 23:10]. Finem eorum appetens gloriosum sed labores abhorrebat quibus gloria merebatur.” (Such a person was cunning Balaam who, looking upon the encampments of the Israelites and understanding that the Lord had made them a promise of eternal happiness, said, “Let my soul die the death of the just, and my last end be like to them.” He desired their glorious end but shunned the labors by which glory is earned.) The source of the exemplum as it is recounted here is Peter of Blois, Compendium in Job 42, PL 207:824c. ¹⁷⁰ Gerard, Cordiale, fol. 93r: “Dives epulabatur cotidie hic splendide indutus purpura et bisso sed mortuus quod Moysi noluit credere postmodum sensit positus in tormentis.” The example quotes the introductory verse of the parable (Lk 16:19), then gives the gist of its remainder: the rich man and his brothers failed to heed the message of charity and compassion from Moses and the prophets (Lk 16:29–31).

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Geoffrey of Auxerre) repeats Abraham’s reproach to the rich man as he begs for relief from the torments he suffers in hell (Lk 16:25): “Thou didst receive good things in thy lifetime, and likewise Lazarus evil things, but now he is comforted and thou art tormented” (Lk 16:25); Peter of Blois quotes the same verse to support the argument that a person is wrong to believe they may enjoy both the delights of this world and the riches of heaven.¹⁷¹ The production of examples is rescued from this temporary idling—it is as if the discourse keeps looping back on itself—only by a sudden switch of perspective: from considering those who were too wedded to worldly delights and comforts to gain entry into heaven to focusing on those who willingly renounced the pleasures of this world and received their eternal reward. “Truly, my brother,” the author says in a direct address to the reader, “truly, no matter what may be said you should hold firmly to the principle that you will never climb to heaven unless you keep to the teachings of the disciples in your conduct, your words, and your faith. And what did they teach? Was it not to live soberly and justly, to devote all our efforts to humility, patience, charity, constancy, and all the other virtues, to despise the world and everything that belongs to it, to shun riches and pleasures, do penance, rejoice and be happy in tribulations and sufferings?” In Jesus’s disciples, the discourse has a multiple of examples, each one of whom might be named individually and held up for examination; it is a multiple moreover that potentially includes the reader if she will only heed the call to follow in their footsteps: “You too, do the same, and you shall live.”¹⁷²

¹⁷¹ Gerard, Cordiale, fol. 93r–v: “Istud etiam innuere videtur beatus Bernardus in colloquio Symonis Petri et Iesu ubi taliter inquit [Geoffrey of Auxerre, De colloquio Simonis cum Jesu 23.27, ed. Rochais, 154–6]: Abraham ait diviti epuloni, ‘Tu recepisti bona in vita tua, et Lazarus similiter mala, nunc autem hic consolatur, tu vero cruciaris.’ . . . Unde Petrus Blesensis super Iob ad regem Anglie ita dicit [Peter of Blois, Compendium in Job 42, PL 207:824d]: Putasne quod aliquis in presenti vita gaudeat et futura? Si tamen gaudium debeat dici quod turbatur assidue et respergitur amaritudine presenti. Nimis delicatus es, si utrumque presumis, uti seculo et frui Christo, presentis mundi delicias capere et nichilominus celestis glorie divitias obtinere. Audi quid dictum sit illi diviti in Evangelio qui cruciabatur in flamma et lingue ardentis refrigerium postulabat. ‘Fili recordare, quia recepisti bona in vita tua, et Lazarus similiter mala.’ ” (The blessed Bernard also seems to suggest this in his dialogue of Simon Peter and Jesus, where he says: “Abraham said to the rich glutton: ‘Thou didst receive good things in thy lifetime, and likewise Lazarus evil things, but now he is comforted and thou art tormented.’ ” [Lk 16:25] . . . Therefore Peter of Blois says in his commentary on Job to the king of England [Peter was in the service of Henry II]: “Do you believe a person may enjoy happiness in this present life and the future one? Only if that may be called happiness which is clouded and stained with present bitterness. You are very much given to pleasure if you presume you may have both the use of the world and the benefit of Christ, enjoy the pleasures of the present world and obtain the riches of heavenly glory nonetheless. Hear what that rich man in the gospel was told who was tormented in the fires of hell and requested cooling water for his burning tongue: ‘Son, remember that thou didst receive good things in thy lifetime, and likewise Lazarus evil things, but now he is comforted and thou art tormented.’ ”) ¹⁷² Gerard, Cordiale, fols. 93v–94r: “Vere, frater, vere, quicquid dicatur firmiter hoc tene quod celum non aliter scandes, nisi quod docuere discipuli teneas moribus, ore, fide. Et quid docuerunt illi? Nonne sobrie et iuste vivere, humilitatem et patientiam, caritatem et constantiam ac virtutes ceteras totis viribus retinere, mundum et que mundi sunt despicere, divitias et delicias fugere, penitentiam agere, in tribulationibus et miseriis letari et gaudere. Tu quoque fac simile, et vives.”

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For a moment, in the relation of the story of the rich man and Lazarus, examples are iterated instead of multiplied. This malfunction, which may or may not have been intentional, has the effect of temporarily foregrounding the two modes of repetition governing the “process” (to use Gerard’s own term) of the text’s rhetorical discourse.¹⁷³ Moreover, and more importantly, it has the further effect of forcing these modes, the difference and the interrelation between them, upon the attention of the reader, who has been repeating and continuing the operations of iteration and mutliplication in her own meditative realization of the text and its discourse. In that brief moment, when the reader’s hitherto seamless performance of these operations is interrupted, the textuality of eschatological remembrance as well as the textuality of the inner person to be reformed by such remembrance are lit up for the same reader: the former, because it is shown to rest upon the rhetorical procedures of iteration and multiplication that have generated the discourse of the text the reader has before her; the latter, because the metaphor of “cordially and continuously imprinting” the remembrance of the last things on the reader’s heart, introduced in the preface by way of explaining the author’s choice of title for his work,¹⁷⁴ is shown to envisage more specifically a process of writing, or rewriting, the text of the soul as a discourse of sententious iteration and exemplary multiplication. Thus, the momentary faltering of the text’s “process” reveals nothing less than the entanglement of the soul-as-text in the process and procedures of actually written textuality.

¹⁷³ See above, 186–7.

¹⁷⁴ Ibid.

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5 Grace, Faith, Scripture, Spirit Lutheran Transformations

1. “Enclose the scriptures in your heart” In a landscape of wooded hillsides punctuated by the spires and gables of human habitations a young boy lies sleeping, oblivious to what is in his immediate vicinity: the skull over which he has folded his forearms to make a pillow for his head; the hourglass perched on the grassy hummock just above, its sands trickling away; most ominously of all the deathly arrow that a skeletal bowman has aimed and is on the point of firing at him. These are the symbolically charged components of a woodcut illustration of Sirach 7:40, whose words “In all thy works remember thy last end, and thou shalt never sin” are written above the scene as a caption (Fig. 5.1). Picture and verse together occupy a whole page in the Sterbekunst (Art of dying), a handbook of religious eschatological instruction by the Lutheran pastor Thomas Thanhöltzner published in 1577.¹ The placement of the image and accompanying caption, after a dedicatory preface and immediately before the main text, lends them the function of a condensed introduction: they announce the subject matter of the book and indicate the rationale for remembering. The caption conveys the rationale verbally, by stating the consequence of remembering (“and thou shalt never sin”), whereas the picture deploys the resources of iconography in order to present the inescapable fact of mortality as that which makes remembrance so urgent and necessary: by combining symbols of transience and mortality with connotators of life in full bloom, the picture intimates that in the midst of life we are in death; that from the moment we are born (the nakedness and chubbiness of the sleeping boy suggest a young child) we are old enough to die; hence that it is never too early to begin learning to live in the horizon of the last end.² Moreover, by putting the viewer in the position of someone who is able to see what the child does not see: the skull, the hourglass, the deathly bowman, the picture begins to install that same horizon in the viewer and thus creates a receptive frame of mind for the ¹ Thanhöltzner, Sterbekunst (VD16 T692), A[4]v. The author is identified on the title-page as a pastor in Riegersdorf and Ditmarsdorf (now Dittmannsdorf), near Görlitz in Upper Lusatia. ² For the iconography of death and transience, see LCI 4:219 (“Stundenglas”), 327–32 (“Tod”), 343 (“Totenkopf”), 409–12 (“Vanitas”). Numerous examples are reproduced and discussed by Kiening, Das andere Selbst. Meditating Death in Medieval and Early Modern Devotional Writing: From Bonaventure to Luther. Mark Chinca, Oxford University Press (2020). © Mark Chinca. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198861980.001.0001

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Fig. 5.1 Death and sleeping child. Thomas Thanhöltzner, Sterbekunst, Görlitz: Ambrosius Fritsch, 1577, Sig. A[4]v. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, shelfmark Asc. 3975.

lessons in eschatological mindfulness that will follow. These are dispensed in six brief chapters, each one consisting of an initial instruction which is backed up by copious citations from scripture: always remember your mortality; learn the reasons for it; learn that there is a life after death, which lasts forever and will be spent in either heaven or hell according to God’s judgment; make sure to repent

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and not despair of God’s mercy; select verses from the Bible, enclose them in your heart, and recollect them your whole life long; pray for the forgiveness of sins and for salvation, for the increase of faith and the support of the Holy Spirit, and for an easy death and a good exit from this life. The Sterbekunst is typical of the Lutheran literature on remembering the last end that was produced in prolific quantities in the second half of the sixteenth century, the period that witnessed the formation of distinct and often highly polarized Lutheran, Catholic, and Calvinist confessional identities in Germany, each bolstered by its own literature of religious instruction and devotion.³ Thanhöltzner’s discourse owes its representativity moreover not only to what it includes—the characteristically Protestant recourse to the Bible as sole authority—but also and especially to what it excludes. Comparing it with the meditative regimens of pre-Reformation Christianity, and also those of CounterReformation Catholicism, the reader is struck first of all by the total lack of eschatological imagination. Beyond citing Scriptural authorities for the existence and the inevitability of death, the certainty of bodily resurrection, judgment, everlasting joy in heaven and punishment in hell, there is no attempt to visualize the last things, to make their terror and their beatific splendor vividly present to the intellect or senses.⁴ Furthermore, there is no regimen of meditative exercise with which to conjure up a virtual experience of death and the afterlife; the instructions to meditate do not exceed the barest commands to “remember your mortality daily,” “occupy yourself the whole time with thoughts of death,” “collect many choice, foundational, and clear verses from the Old and New Testaments, hear them, enclose them in your heart, and always recollect them throughout life or in sickness.”⁵ Finally, reflection on the last things is not harnessed to any project ³ For an outline of historical developments between the religious settlement of Augsburg of 1555 and the end of the century, see Cameron, European Reformation, 361–81. The term “confessionalism” as it has been used by historians of early modern Germany embraces a complex set of religious, political, social, and cultural shifts in the period 1555–1620; cumulatively, these changes brought about nothing less than the transformation of medieval society, with its basis in personal relations, into the “institutional” or “territorial” states of early modernity. See especially Schilling, “Konfessionalisierung,” and Reinhard, “Sozialdisziplinierung – Konfessionalisierung – Modernisierung”; also the critique of the concept by Schmidt, “Sozialdisziplinierung?” Studies of Lutheran devotional literature also register a change in the style of discourse from around the middle of the century, although they characterize it in different and not always compatible terms: as “post-Reformation” and increasingly formalistic and academic (Beck, Erbauungsliteratur, 193–9); as increasingly subjective, inward, and emotional (Althaus, Evangelische Gebetsliteratur, 59–66); as a distinctly devotional strand running in parallel to learned theological discourse (Schottroff, Bereitung, 96–7). ⁴ Thanhöltzner, Sterbekunst, A5r–v (death’s inevitability: Gn 3:19; Sir 14:17–18; Rom 5:12; 1 Kgs 2:2; Eccl 2:16); A[7]r–v (death exists through the devil and through human willfulness and sinfulness: Gn 3:1–6; Ws 2:23–4; Rom 5:12); A[8]v–B2v (resurrection, judgment, hell, and heaven: Mt 10:28; Tb 4:3; Eccl 12:7; Ws 3:1–3; Lk 23:43; Ps (48:15) 49:14; Ps (54:16) 55:15; Lk 16:19–31; Jb 19:25–7; Is 26:19; Jn 5:28–9; Is 66:24; Is 64:4; 1 Cor 2:9; Mt 25:46). ⁵ Thanhöltzner, Sterbekunst, C1v: “sich doch teglich seiner sterbligkeit erinnern”; C3v: “allzeit mit Todtsgedancken vmbgehen”; C4r: “auch viel ausserlesener / gruͤndtlicher vnnd heller Spruͤche aus dem Alten vnd Newen Testament zusammen lesen / hoͤren / in sein Hertz schliessen / vnd stets in seinem leben oder auff seinem Siechbett daran gedencken.”

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of spiritual reform or perfection, as if the believer’s soul might be gradually restored or reordered. Where the pre-Reformation schemes of Bonaventure and the Devotio Moderna proposed spiritual ascents of purgation, illumination, and unification, Thanhöltzner prescribes only repentance to believers who, however much they might remember their last end and mend their ways in consequence, always remain sinners: “Seeing as a person is conceived and born in sin, and because baptism only washes away and forgives sin, but does not totally eradicate it from human nature . . . a person must make a true, living, and earnest repentance.”⁶ The reduction of the traditional apparatus of eschatological meditation to a few simple imperatives—“enclose the scriptures in your heart,” “remember,” “repent”—is an example of the kind of change that historians of the Reformation describe as “normative centering.” Defined as “the alignment of both religion and society towards a standardizing, authoritative, regulating and legitimizing focal point,” the term is intended to equip the historian with an interpretive category for modeling the transition from late medieval to Reformation Christianity as a mutation that both continues pre-existing trends and constitutes a qualitative change within them.⁷ Around the turn of the sixteenth century, there was already a powerful trend in theology toward “reducing and simplifying complex systems to a manageable set of core principles”; these processes (which have also been described as a “compression,” “consolidation,” “concentration,” or “standardization”) are manifest in the so-called “theology of piety” that emerged at the end of the fifteenth century and whose character may be summarized as “christocentric, oriented around the Passion, and centered upon a trust in God’s promise and grace.”⁸ The Reformation continued and intensified these emphases, the crucial point being that it also radicalized them by completely jettisoning certain other elements of the religious system with which the simplified products of reduction and compression had previously “remained in a state of open plurality.”⁹ There is no clearer illustration of this than the sola formulations that famously epitomized and sloganized the core theological messages of the Reformation. Believers are saved sola gratia and sola fide, by God’s grace and by faith alone; the truth of this is revealed sola scriptura, by the scriptures alone; faith is incited, and the Word is made effective, solo spiritu, by the Holy Spirit alone.

⁶ Ibid., B3v: “nach dem der Mensch in Suͤnden entpfangen vnd geboren ist / Oder / weil die Suͤnde in der Tauffe allein abgewaschen vnd vergeben / nicht aber gantz vnd gar aus seiner Natur gerodet wird . . . mus er ware / lebendige vnd ernste Busse thun.” ⁷ The term “normative centering” was first proposed by Berndt Hamm, who explained it in two important essays, “Reformation als normative Zentrierung,” and “Von der spätmittelalterlichen reformatio zur Reformation.” An English-language synthesis of them has appeared as “Normative Centering”; the definition is cited from the latter (3). ⁸ Hamm, “Normative Centering,” 7, 43. See also Hamm, “Von der spätmittelalterlichen reformatio zur Reformation,” 18–35. ⁹ Hamm, “Normative Centering,” 43.

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These formulations were not entirely new: comparable ones were used by theologians in the decades immediately before Luther’s “breakthrough” in the 1510s. His versions of them however possessed an altogether different valency because of his insistence on the utter transcendence of God and his consequent rejection of late medieval gradualism: the theological position according to which there is a gradation from sinfulness to perfection, and humans may contribute to ascending it through their own good works and efforts. Because of his uncompromising dismissal of such a possibility, Luther reduced the sola principles to a “concentration on the singular and one-sided efficacy of God’s role in man’s salvation” and thereby “broke with [the] plural and gradualist system” of late medieval theology.¹⁰ This chapter describes how, for a large number of Christians in western Europe by the close of the sixteenth century, the familiar regimens and practices for remembering the last end had been transformed and realigned with the sola principles of Lutheran theology. Luther’s insistence that “God’s grace alone must save us,” that redemption is a free gift bestowed by a merciful deity, and in no way earned by human merits, correlates with a radical redirection of meditative attention, away from the individual person’s eschatological future and on to the present “age of grace” in which, thanks to Christ’s sacrifice, the believer lives.¹¹ Remembering the last end is no longer a matter of imagining a future life in hell or heaven, but of acknowledging the finitude of this life and thereby arriving at an understanding of the present time as kairos: as the qualitatively “right time” or “season” for seizing the opportunity that the gift of grace extends. That opportunity is seized through faith in Christ; the proof text for Luther is Romans 3:28, the verse into which his German Bible notoriously and controversially added the word “alone”: “For we account a man to be justified by faith alone, without the works of the law.”¹² Faith is so central that it reduces gradations of human endeavor to indifference: “In this faith,” Luther writes, “all works become equal and one is the same as any other; all distinctions of works fall away, whether they are great, small, short, long, many or few. For works are not acceptable [to God] for their own sake, but on account of faith, which is simply and undifferentiatedly present, effective, and living in each and every work, no matter how many and how different.”¹³ ¹⁰ Ibid., 45; cf. Hamm, “Reformation als normative Zentrierung,” 251–3, 260–7; Hamm, “Von der spätmittelalterlichen reformatio zur Reformation,” 36–41, 77–81. The much debated question of exactly when in the 1510s Luther’s theological breakthrough occurred—as early as 1513 or not before 1517–18?—need not concern us; for a review of the various positions and controversies, see Cameron, European Reformation, 168–74. ¹¹ Luther, Kirchenpostille, Epistle for Christmas morning, Ti 3:4–7, WA 10, pt. i, bk. 1:105: “alleyn die gnade gottis muß selig machen.” ¹² Luther justified the insertion on idiomatic as well as theological grounds in his famous defense of his Bible translation, the Sendbrief vom Dolmetschen (Open Letter on Translating) of 1530 (WA 30, pt. ii:627–46; LW 35:181–202). ¹³ Luther, Von den guten Werken, WA 6:206–7: “In dießem glauben werden alle werck gleich, und ist einß wie das ander, fellet ab aller underscheidt der werck, sie sein groß, klein, kurtz, lang, viel odder wenig. Dan nit die werck von yrer wegen, sundern vonn des glauben wegen angenehm seind, welcher

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Such indifference spelled the complete reframing of spiritual exercise as a practice of personal devotion. It was not that Protestants no longer examined their consciences, reflected, or meditated, but rather that the discipline of mental concentration was no longer programmed by laddered schemes of exercise through which the believer reformed her soul and ascended step by step to perfection. Since perfection was deemed to be unachievable through human endeavor, the process of meditation unfolded within the parameters set by the simple injunction to “hear and believe” the scriptures. These alone, declared Luther, were the authoritative source for faith;¹⁴ thus they quickly became the only kind of text on which Lutheran Protestants relied to guide and focus their thoughts when remembering the last end. Moreover, to read and meditate on the scriptures, to “enclose them in the heart,” simultaneously required an opening of the heart to the Holy Spirit, which alone stimulates faith and makes the divine Word effective. We humans may think we understand the Bible, Luther once remarked, “but the Holy Spirit alone knows it.”¹⁵ The following sections document and explicate the four changes that were constitutive of Lutheran meditatio mortis as it consolidated in the devotional literature produced in the last decades of the sixteenth century: the refocusing of eschatological attention on the kairos of the present time of grace; the condensation of meditative effort in the act of simply hearing and believing the Word; the reduction of the range of textual supports for meditation to the scriptures alone; the opening of the human heart to the understanding—and also the language—of the Spirit. Cumulatively, these changes resulted in the new style of remembering the last end that is epitomized in Thanhöltzner’s exhortation to enclose the scriptures in one’s heart. They also illustrate the point made above about normative centering involving both the continuation of tradition as well as a qualitative leap or rupture within it. The continuity within which a break occurs is threefold. First, Sirach 7:40 retained its status as a guiding maxim for Christian devotion, and continued to be articulated and parsed out into programmatic directions that gave form and content to remembrance. It was the form and the content that were entirely transformed: no more spiritual exercise, and a new concentration on the present time of grace at the expense of the eschatological future. Second, Lutheran remembrance of the last end continued to be a text-centered practice of meditation; the difference is that the text was always the Bible and, more crucially, that the connection between text-work and soul-work was abolished: the believer who enclosed the scriptures in her heart scaled no ladder of perfection, but remained a

einig und on underscheid in allen und iglichen wercken ist, wirckt und lebet, wievil und unterschidlich sie ymmer sein.” Treatise on Good Works, LW 44:26. ¹⁴ Luther, letter 74, WA Br 1:70–4; LW 48:203–9. ¹⁵ Luther, Tischreden 1234, WA TR 2:3: “Solus Spiritus Sanctus hoc scit.” LW 54:127.

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fallen sinner. Finally, remembering the last end continued to be associated with a permanent modification of language. In pre-Reformation times, this modification always remained within the scope of human language and the human speech community. The person who meditated on her last end according to the instructions of the “Treatise on Virtues” would come to realize that whenever she employed ordinary-language words such as “life” and “death,” “riches,” “joy,” and “honor,” she was in fact speaking antiphrastically;¹⁶ the reader of Seuse who heeded Eternal Wisdom’s advice made room in her conversational routines for an additional daily talk with the dead.¹⁷ In the first example, one kind of human language use, the literal, is supplanted by another, which uses tropes; in the second, the range of human conversation partners is enlarged to include the dead. When however Protestants were urged to “reform their tongues” as a result of remembering their last end, the “new language” they were exhorted to learn was not the language of humans, dead or alive, but the language of the Spirit. Its language had the effect of turning ordinary everyday language into a dead letter.

2. Kairos The iconography of the Thanhöltzner woodcut reveals that Sirach 7:40 has been interpreted to mean “Remember your death.” In construing the plural novissima as having a singular referent, Thanhöltzner is very much in the Lutheran mainstream, as the following sample of interpretations and applications of the maxim will show. “Therefore,” because remembering the inevitability of death has a salutary effect on a person’s moral conduct, “Sirach chapter 7 states: ‘Memento nouissima, & in æternum non peccabis.’ That is: ‘Whoever well remembers the hour of his death will refrain from sin his whole life long.’ ”¹⁸ “Scripture has assiduously commanded us to remember our own death and also taught us what magnificent fruits and profits are attendant upon such remembrance: Sirach, chap. 7: ‘In all thy works remember thy last end, and thou shalt never sin.’ ”¹⁹ “The last dear hour is the end that must finally come to all men . . . and every Christian must earn his doctorate in what he has heard, learned, and believed from God’s word all his life long . . . That is the reason why Holy Scripture admonishes us so frequently and earnestly to prepare unstintingly for ¹⁶ Chapter 2, 106–8. ¹⁷ Chapter 3, 112–13. ¹⁸ Joachim Stige, Trostbüchlein für Sterbende (1580, VD16 S9027), B5r: “Darumb sagt Syrach Cap. 7. Memento nouissima, & in æternum non peccabis. Das ist / wer sein sterbstuͤndlein wol bedenckt / der huͤtet sich sein leben lang fur Suͤnden.” ¹⁹ Melchior Specker, Vom leiblichen Todt (1560, VD16 S8169), *1v: “Es hat vns aber auch vnsers eignen todts staͤte gedaͤchtnuß / die schrifft fleissig befolhen / vnnd darzuͦ gelehret / was für herrliche frucht vnd nutz / solche gedaͤchtnuß mit sich bringe. Syrach vij. cap. Was du thuͦst / so bedencke das ende / so würstu nimmermehr vbels thuͦn.” On the author (fl. 1554–69) and this treatise, see Ittzés, “Text and Subtext.”

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our last hour, and daily learn to die, as it is written in Psalm 90 [verse 12]: ‘Teach us to number our days, that we may apply ourselves unto wisdom.’ . . . Sirach 7: ‘In all thy works remember thy last end, and thou shall never sin.’ ”²⁰ Whenever the reference of novissima is construed plurally, so as to include judgment, hell, and heaven, this typically happens in a way that assigns to death the status of cardinal last thing. Andreas Musculus’s treatise Bedencks Ende (Remember the end), for example, performs three glossings of the word novissima which successively expand the scope of its referents and put these in an order. According to what Musculus terms the first “understanding” (verstand), novissima refers to death, the last end that everyone should always remember; according to the second, it refers to the last judgment; its third and final referent is the imperatives “come” and “depart” with which the judge will either invite the righteous into everlasting life in heaven or despatch the reprobate to everlasting punishment in hell (Mt 25:34–46).²¹ The ordinals signify not just a temporal sequence of exposition, but a conceptual hierarchy too, because the first “understanding” creates the primary context in which all the other last things may be comprehended as compelling objects of human concern: death is that which will be either eternally vanquished or eternally prolonged depending on whether the sentence handed down on judgment day is “come” to heaven or “depart” into hell. Joachim von Beust’s Enchiridion de arte bene moriendi (Handbook of the art of dying well), a learned Latin treatise which presents itself as the continuation of the ancient philosophical tradition of meletē thanatou, similarly refers everything back to death: the fires of Gehenna are an aspect of eternal death, which consists in everlasting punishment in hell, and the joys of life in heaven are a consolation against the fear of temporal death.²² The Seelenschatz (Thesaurus of the soul) on ²⁰ Andreas Fabricius, Hauskirche (1586, VD16 F268), Gg3v–4r: “Das letzte liebe Stuͤndlein ist das ziel / dahin es endlich mit allen Menschen kommen mus . . . vnd ein jeder Christ seinen Doctorat beweisen mus / was er sein lebenlang aus Gottes wort gehoͤret / gelernet / vnd gegleubet . . . Darumb ermanet die heilige Schrifft so offt vnd ernstlich / das wir vns zu dem Stundtlein ohne vnterlas bereiten / Vnd teglich sterben lernen Wie geschrieben stehet / Psalm 90. Lehre vns bedencken das wir sterben muͤssen / auff das wir klug werden. . . . Syrach. 7 Was du thust / So bedenck das Ende so wirstu nimmermehr Vbels thun.” The translation quotes Ps (89) 90:12 from the Authorized Version rather than the Vulgate because, like Luther, it stays closer to the Masoretic text of the Psalms. The “doctorate” is a common metaphor for the proof of faith and sound Bible knowledge that Lutherans should ideally demonstrate in their hour of death: Schottroff, Bereitung, 92–6. On Fabricius (1528–1577), see the biographical sketch at Controversia et Confessio digital, ed. Irene Dingel, http://www.controversia-etconfessio.de/id/f3a2319a-6139-4cbf-868f-99559c6468b5 (accessed October 10, 2019). ²¹ Andreas Musculus, Bedencks Ende (1572, VD16 M7121), B1v, D3r–v, D[8]r. On the author (1514–1581), see NDB 18:626–7. ²² Joachim von Beust, Enchiridion (1593, VD16 ZV1428), 88r–91v, 108r–109v. VD16 and VD17 list five further Latin editions and three of a German translation between 1593 and 1609. The author (1522–1597), a learned jurist, legitimates the project of teaching readers how to die well with an opening reference to Plato: “Cum tota Philosophia, teste Platone, nihil aliud sit, quam meditatio sive præparatio ad mortem, & omnis ars sua præcepta habeat, ideo de Arte bene moriendi sive ἐυϑανασία præcepta quædam ob oculos ponam” (4r–v); cf. Plato, Phaedo 81a, ed. Rowe, 56; trans. Gallop, 32. Lutheran authors were in fact ambivalent on the question of the continuity between pagan meletē thanatou and Christian meditatio mortis: while some, such as Beust and also Ambrosius Blarer,

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the other hand, a work of popular theology by Paul Jenisch, insinuates hierarchy through the circularity of its discourse: a chapter on death is followed by two more devoted to the last judgment and eternal life; the sequence constitutes not so much a progress through the last things as a tour that will come full circle, since Jenisch’s concluding point—that the prospect of everlasting joy in heaven should encourage every Christian to welcome death rather than fear it—brings the reader back to the proposition with which the whole argument had opened, namely that the fear of death is a natural human sentiment.²³ The foregrounding of death over the other last things is a consequence of Luther’s doctrine of justification and the notion of time associated with it.²⁴ According to the teaching of the late medieval church, salvation was a process to which both God and humans make their contribution. Sinners are made righteous in the eyes of God first of all by an infusion of divine grace which transforms their potential for moral action, and in the second place by their realization of that potential through the active demonstration of virtue and the performance of good works. The human contribution did not necessarily end with death, since it was believed that prayers and masses offered by the living on behalf of the dead, and for which individuals often made provision in their wills, were capable of continuing and completing any work that the deceased had left undone in this life.²⁵ Protestant teaching by contrast conceived of justification as a once-and-for-all event in which human activity and human merit play no part whatsoever. The sinner is “covered,” in Luther’s metaphor, by a cloak of righteousness which belongs to God alone; this covering extends to each and every sinner because God offered Christ, his own son, as a propitiatory sacrifice to himself on behalf of all transgressing humanity; humans contribute nothing to accepted it (see Blarer’s preface to Johannes Zwick, Christenlicher ganz tröstlicher Unterricht [1545, VD16 Z275], A[7]r–[8]r), others contested it vehemently, for example Specker, Vom leiblichen Todt, )([4]v, and Johannes Sutell, Historia von Lazaro (1543, VD16 S10311), B2r–v. On the latter, see note 66 to this chapter; for Beust’s biography ADB 2:587. ²³ Jenisch, Seelenschatz (1595, VD16 J215), 433–97 (“Vom Tode,” with an appendix of exempla of persons who died without fear of death), 497–522 (“Vom Juͤngsten tage”), 522–57 (“Vom ewigen Leben”). For the author (1551–1612), who was a school director in Saxony, and subsequently pastor, court preacher, and superintendent, see the entry in the Sächsische Biografie, http://saebi.isgv.de/ biografie/Paulus_Jenisius_(um_1551-1612) (accessed October 10, 2019). VD17 lists five further editions of the Seelenschatz between 1613 and 1619. ²⁴ The following description of Catholic and Protestant doctrine is based on the remarkably lucid exposition by Hamm, “Was ist reformatorische Rechtfertigungslehre?” (trans. “What Was the Reformation Doctrine of Justification?”). ²⁵ This intercessory relationship constitutes the much discussed late medieval community of the living and the dead, which the Reformation is said to have torn asunder or at best tolerated within the bounds of a purely secular remembrance of the dead; see Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, 396–411; Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 268–70, 287–328, 404–5; Koslofsky, Reformation of the Dead, 19–39; Oexle, “Die Gegenwart der Toten”; Othenin-Girard, “ ‘Helfer’ und ‘Gespenster.’” Recent scholarship emphasizes however that early modern Lutheran cultures of commemoration retained a substantial religious and devotional component; see Hamm, “Normierte Erinnerung”; Heal, “Commemoration and Consolation”; Marshall, “After Purgatory.”

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their righteousness, but simply place themselves under the shelter of divine righteousness through faith in Christ and the promise of unconditional salvation preached by him in the Gospel.²⁶ Ever since that preaching, humans have been living in the “time of grace,” during which, according to Luther, “everyone may go before the throne of God’s grace with complete confidence, as it is written Hebrews [chapter] 4” (verse 16: “Let us go therefore with confidence to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and seasonable aid”).²⁷ Mercy and seasonable aid must be obtained by every person on their own behalf, however, and that means going to the throne while still alive; death, which under the old religion had posed no obstacle to helping oneself as well as others to salvation, was now the great caesura. Luther’s concept of the “time of grace” (“zeyt der gnaden”) derives from, indeed often seems to gloss, the word kairos in the Greek New Testament. (The word for “seasonable” in Hebrews 4:16, for example, is eukairos, literally “well timed.”) Unlike chronos, the ordinary Greek word for “time” as a quantifiable duration of years, months, and days, kairos, meaning “due measure” or “fitness” and, by extension, “favorable time” or “season,” refers to a qualitative aspect of time which is to the fore in the notion of the right time or opportune moment; it also has the intensified meaning of a critical time, one fraught with conflict as well as potential and confronting those who live in it with the urgent necessity of making a choice.²⁸ This latter sense underlies the usage of the New Testament, whose Greek-speaking authors applied the word kairos to the critical moment “at which history has matured to the point of being able to receive the breakthrough of the manifestation of God,” and which human actors experience as a “moment of time approaching [them] as fate and decision.”²⁹ The prime example of such a moment ²⁶ Luther borrows the metaphor from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans 4:7 (“Blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven, and whose sins are covered [tecta]”) and embellishes it by relating it to the coverlet (pallium) that Ruth asked Booz to pull over her (Ru 3:9), and to the garment (amictus) that God spread over Jerusalem’s nakedness (Ez 16:8). He also connects the passage from Romans with Psalm (31) 32:1 which, in a literal translation, reads “Blessed is he whose transgression is being relieved [fiens levatus], whose sin is being covered,” and insists that passive construction indicates that the blessed man “is relieved actively by God and passively in himself” (Lectures on Romans, scholia, WA 56:277–8; LW 25:264–5). ²⁷ Luther, Kirchenpostille, Epistle for Christmas morning, Ti 3:4–7, WA 10, pt. i, bk. 1:97, expounds Titus 3:4 (“when the goodness and kindness of God our Saviour appeared”) thus: “Das ist die tzeyt der gnadenn, da mag yderman zu dem thron seyner gnaden gehen mit aller tzuuorsicht, alß heb. 4 geschrieben steht.” ²⁸ For the meanings of the words, see Liddell and Scott, Greek-English Lexikon, s.vv. kairos, chronos; Smith, “Time and Qualitative Time.” Luther’s sensitivity to the special significance of kairos as a “time of grace” may have derived from two sources: almost certainly from comparing the Greek New Testament with the more familiar Latin Vulgate, which typically renders kairos and chronos indiscriminately as tempus (see for example Mk 1:14; Jn 5:6, 7:8, 33; Rom 5:6, 7:1, 13:11, 16.25; Gal 4:4, 6:9–10; Eph 1:10), and possibly also from ancient rhetorical theory, where kairos acquired an almost terminological valency as the word that designated the temporal aspect of rhetorical propriety (prepon): the time when it is appropriate to speak in a manner befitting both the audience and the circumstances (see Kinneavy, “Kairos”). ²⁹ Tillich, Systematic Theology 3:369; Tillich, “Kairos und Logos,” Gesammelte Werke 4:46. Tillich’s primary intention was not to expound the meaning of the word kairos in the New Testament, but rather to extrapolate from it to a universal Christian understanding of history as the interplay between

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is Christ’s preaching of the gospel: “Jesus came in Galilee, preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God, and saying: The time [kairos] is accomplished, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe the gospel” (Mk 1:14–15). For Luther it is this moment, the commencement of Christ’s public ministry, rather than the event of his nativity, that constitutes the real turning-point in history: “The New Testament and the time of grace also begin at that point, not with the birth of Christ, as he himself says, Mark 1 [verse 15]: ‘The time is accomplished, and the kingdom of God is at hand.’ For if he had not begun to preach, his birth would have been to no avail, but when he began to minister and to teach, all the prophecies also began, and the whole of scripture, and a new light, and a new world.”³⁰ Accomplishment is figured here as inception: the fulfillment of the kairos inaugurates a new historical and eschatological conjuncture, a “new world” in which the prophecies of the Old Testament start to become real and anyone who repents and believes the gospel may be cloaked in God’s righteousness.³¹ Awareness of living in the time of grace is only sharpened by the sense of finitude that comes from meditating on death. Lutheran writers on meditatio mortis consistently draw their readers’ attention back to what lies on this side of the great caesura, as though the quality of the present time, rather than the fact of mortality, were the most important thing to grasp and act upon: “We should not live in security with the world of godlessness, sleeping through or missing the present time of grace . . . but rather we should lift up our eyes and hearts and, by the light of the gospel, heed the time of grace in true repentance and faith”;³² “Whoever does not consider in the time of grace how he may be saved is alas a lost cause and bound to die at the last in fear and despair, with an unquiet gnawing

an objective fate, which puts opportunity in humans’ way, and human freedom in choosing whether to respond to the opportunity; see Smith, “Time and Qualitative Time,” 55–6; O’Neill, Tillich, 75–82. For the New Testament usage: New Testament Greek Lexicon, s.v. kairos; Sipiora, “Kairos.” ³⁰ Luther, Adventspostille, Gospel for the fourth Sunday in Advent, Jn 1:19–28, WA 10, pt. i, bk. 2:203: “da fehet auch das newe testament und die tzeyt der gnaden an, nicht an der gepurt Christi, wie er selb auch saget Marci 1 [Mk 1:15]: Die tzeytt ist erfullet, unnd das reych gottis ist erbey komen. Denn wo er nicht angefangen hette tzu predigen, were seyn gepurt keyn nutze geweßen, aber da er anfieng tzu thun und tzu leren, da giengen auch an alle propheceyen und die ganntze schrifft unnd eyn new liecht, unnd eyn new wellt.” ³¹ Cf. Asendorf, Luther und die Eschatologie, 36–48, and esp. 127: “Die Eschatologie ist . . . nicht mehr spektakuläre Beschreibung des künftigen Weltendes, sondern sie ist der Aufweis der neuen Wirklichkeit inmitten der alten Welt der Sünde und des Todes.” (Eschatology is no longer a spectacular description of the end of the world, but the showing of the new reality in the midst of the old world of sin and death.) ³² Sigismund Suevus, Spiegel des menschlichen Lebens (1587/1588, VD16 S4548), 196v: “Das wir ja nicht sollen mit der Gottlosen Welt in sicherheit leben / die gegenwertige Gnadenzeit verschlaffen oder verseumen / . . . Sondern das wir vnsere Augen vnd Hertzen auffheben / der Gnadenzeit bey dem Liechte des Euangelij / in warer Busse vnd Glauben warnemen.” On the author (1526–1596), see Hoffmann, Sigismund Suevus.

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worm and conscience, and perish for ever and always”;³³ “The time of this life in its entirety is the time of the gospel sermon of grace, of repentance, of faith, of the atonement and forgiveneness of sins, so as to attain everlasting life by the grace of God.”³⁴ From statements like these it will be clear that Lutheran meditatio mortis not only subordinated all the other last things to death, as we have already seen; it also subordinated death to the present time of grace, which became the central temporal focus of the meditator’s thoughts at the expense of the eschatological future. Moreover, especially from the last quotation it will be evident that, in the context of remembering the last end, the term “time of grace” refers not only to the time in which everyone finds themselves living, but to each individual life as well. That too is a “time of grace,” defined not by its chronological duration, but by its quality of fulfillment, of being ripe for an existential decision leading to salvation or damnation for all eternity. Remembering the last end thus became nothing less than an instrument for learning to perceive lived time—the time humanity lives in as well as the time an individual person has to live—under the aspect of kairos: under the aspect, that is, of “an unavoidable decision, an inescapable responsibility.”³⁵ This same awareness of the kairos determines the timing of meditation. Compared with pre-Reformation and Counter-Reformation sources, which are often specific in respect of the time of day for meditation or its duration—before retiring to bed in the evening; early in the morning before matins; for one full hour before the evening meal, with fifteen minutes allocated to review and reflection³⁶—Lutheran indications are sparse and vague: “daily,” “constantly,” “always” are all the guidance that authors are normally willing to give.³⁷ The chronos of meditation, its location in countable clock time and the routine of institutional life, is a matter of complete indifference to them; what is important is the kairos. The last end should be remembered while the time is propitious; for the individual, that means any time up until the last hour. The principle is established as early as 1519, in Luther’s Sermon von der Bereitung zum Sterben (Sermon on Preparing ³³ Nicodemus Kramer, Der Steg und Weg zum ewigen Leben (1563, VD16 K2215), A4r–v: “Wer denn nu nicht in der gnaden zeit getrachtet / wie er muͤge selig werden / Vmb einen solchen menschen / O leider ist es aus vnd mus letzlichen mit einem vnruigen fressenden worm vnd gewissen / in angst vnd verzweiffelung dahin sterben / vnd ewiglich verderben.” ³⁴ Leonhard Culmann, Trostbüchle (1551, VD16 C6282; cited from the 1559 edition, VD16 C6284), 5r–v: “die zeit dises gantzen lebens ist die zeit der gnaden / predig deß Euangelij / der Buͦß / deß glaubens / der versoͤnung vnd vergebung der sünden / zuͦerlangen das ewig leben auß gnaden Gottes.” On the author (ca. 1500–1561), see Senger, Leonhard Culmann; on the Trostbüchle and its textual history, Resch, Trost, 139–41. ³⁵ Tillich, “Kairos II,” in Gesammelte Werke 6:33: “Eine Zeit als Kairos betrachten heißt, sie im Sinne einer unentrinnbaren Entscheidung, einer unausweichlichen Verantwortung betrachten.” ³⁶ Radewijns, Tractatulus, ed. Legrand, chaps. 14–15; Zerbolt, De reformatione, ed. Legrand, chap. 19; Ignatius Loyola, Exercitia spiritualia, sections 12–13, 72, 77, ed. Calveras and Dalmases, 150–2, 204, 208; Spiritual Exercises, trans. Ganss, 24–5, 48, 49. ³⁷ It would take up more space than making the point justifies to document every single occurrence of the adverbs taͤglich, stets, ohne unterlas; they are frequent.

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to Die), a work of pastoral advice in the late medieval Augustinian tradition of guides to dying well which, thanks to its incorporation into the Lutheran prayer book, became a staple of devotional reading among German-speaking Protestants.³⁸ The Sermon is concerned with three topics of meditation, death, sin, and hell, and the way in which their effect on the meditator changes according to the kairos. During life, Luther states, these topics are timely and proportionate objects of contemplation, capable of encouraging believers to a salutary repentance; at the last hour, however, they are “untimely images” (unzeitig bild) which the devil magnifies out of all proportion in the dying person’s thoughts and meditations with the aim of terrifying her and causing her to relinquish her faith; at this juncture, the only correct response is to dismiss the images of death, sin, and hell from the mind, either by striking them out (“außslahen”) or, in another, less iconoclastic metaphor, by seeing through them (“durch sehen”) and on to their salvific counterimages of life, grace, and heaven.³⁹ “These images [death, sin, hell] do not belong at all to this time, other than to combat and expel them”;⁴⁰ “Hell also grows great and waxes” in the mind of the dying person “through too much contemplation and intense reflection at the wrong time [zu unzeit]”;⁴¹ “contemplation of sin is neither fitting nor timely [hatt da kein fug noch zeit]” when the last hour is approaching, instead “it ought to be done in the time of life. In this way the evil spirit perverts everything in life, when we ought to keep the images of death, sin, and hell constantly before us, as it says in Psalm 50

³⁸ The secondary literature on the Sermon is extensive, and has been largely preoccupied with Luther’s relationship to late medieval ars moriendi and the question whether the Sermon represents a radical theological break with tradition; the following is a selection of studies and overviews which also provide further references to the more specialist literature: Hamm, “Luthers Anleitung zum seligen Sterben”; Reinis, Art of Dying, 37–82; Resch, Trost, 54–5; Schottroff, Bereitung, 32–47. On the preceding Augustinian tradition, in particular Johannes von Paltz and Johann von Staupitz, both of whom wrote advice on dying well for the elite in Saxony, see Endriß, “Nachfolgung”; Hamm, Frömmigkeitstheologie. The separate editions of the Sermon are listed in Benzing, Lutherbibliographie, nos. 435–56a (German), 457 (Danish), 458–9 (Latin), 460 (Dutch); the German editions were all published between 1519 and 1525. From that date, the German and Latin texts of the Sermon were incorporated into Luther’s prayer book, which became their almost exclusive mode of presentation in sixteenth-century Germany; WA 10, pt. ii:355–69 lists twelve German and two Latin prayer book editions with the Sermon down to 1545; editions published after Luther’s death in 1546 have not been systematically catalogued, but among the ones in VD16 that I have been able to examine at least five further German editions and another in Latin with the text of the Sermon appeared down to 1588. The German Sermon was also reproduced in the collected edition of Luther’s works that appeared in Wittenberg between 1539 and 1559; see Der Sechste teil der Buͤcher des [ . . . ] D. Martini Lutheri (VD16 L 3319), 149r–154v. ³⁹ Luther, Sermon, sections 6–13, WA 2:686–91; LW 42:101–7. Luther’s second strategy, of imagemanipulation rather than sheer iconoclasm, is reminiscent of Seuse’s program of bild mit bilden us triben: a corrective “driving out of images by images.” The purpose of Seuse’s strategy is however altogether different from Luther’s: not focus the mind on the means of salvation, but attain a notion of God. See Falque, “Imagery,” 463; Hamburger, “Speculation,” 381; Lentes, “Bildlichkeit,” 58–9. ⁴⁰ Luther, Sermon, section 9, WA 2:688: “diße bilde gehoren gar nichts / yn diße zeyt / anders / dan mit yhn zu fechten vnd sie auß zu treyben.” LW 42:103. ⁴¹ Ibid., section 8, WA 2:688: “Die helle wirt groß vnd wechst auch durch yhr zuvill ansehen vnd harttes bedencken zu unzeit.” LW 42:102.

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[(50:5) 51:3]: ‘My sin is always before me’ . . . In death, when we ought to have only life, grace, and heaven before us, he opens our eyes for the very first time, and anguishes us with the untimely images [mit den unzeitigen bilden] so that we may not see the right ones”;⁴² “in life one should cultivate the remembrance of death and summon death to our minds, when it is still far off and not vexing us. But in the last hour, when it is already far too strong a presence of its own accord, it is dangerous and of no use. Then one should strike out death’s image and refuse to see it.”⁴³ The principle of recollecting things in their right season is biblical. As part of its lessons in humility and moderation, the Book of ben Sirach recommends: “In the day of good things be not unmindful of evils: and in the day of evils be not unmindful of good things” (11:27). The verse provided the inspiration for a short text on preparing to die that was written only a year or so before the Sermon, and may have been known to Luther: the Libellus auro praestantior de animae praeparatione in extremis laborantis, deque praedestinatione et tentatione fidei (Little book, more excellent than gold, on the preparation of the soul in the throes of death, and on predestination and the temptation of faith).⁴⁴ Using an argument that Luther will replicate, the anonymous author explains that the devil seeks to tempt humans into despair or complacency by prompting them to remember bad things in bad times, and good things in good times; by following Sirach’s principle of timely recollection, however, believers will successfully maintain their hope in God’s providence during the bad times, and their fear of God during the good. Most of the Libellus is taken up with the application of the principle to the hour of death, when the devil will try to preoccupy the dying person’s mind with thoughts of “past sins, and the horror of death, also the punishments of hell, the fury of God’s wrath and undelayable judgment” and “make it dwell on these bad things, so that it does not remember the good things from the Lord”; in such circumstances, the dying person’s response should be to utter the words “Now is not the time for doing this,” along with the famous verses from the Book of Ecclesiastes

⁴² Ibid., section 7, WA 2:687: “Dan die sund betrachten hatt da kein fug noch zeit, das soll man yn der zeit des lebens thun. Alßo vorkeret unß der boße geyst alle ding, am leben, da wir solten des todts, der sund, der helle bild stetig voraugen haben, Als ps. 50 stet, Meyn sund seyn mir alzeit voraugen [Ps (50:5) 51:3] . . . Am todt, da wir solten nur das leben, gnad und selickeit voraugen haben, thut er unß dan aller erst die augen auff und engstet unß mit den unzeitigen bilden, das wir der rechten bilden nit sehen sollen.” LW 42:102. ⁴³ Ibid., section 6, WA 2:687: “Im leben solt man sich mit des todts gedancken uben und zu unß foddern, wan er noch ferne ist und nicht treybt. Aber ym sterben, wan er von yhm selbs schon alzu starck da ist, ist es ferlich und nichts nutz. Da muß man seyn bild ausschlahen und nit sehen wollen.” LW 42:101–2. ⁴⁴ The first printed edition of the Libellus (VD16 L1509) gives September as the month of publication but not the year; for the dating of this print to ca. 1518 and evidence of Luther’s acquaintance with it, see Schottroff, Bereitung, 33–40; the question whether Luther himself may be the author has been explored by Brecht, “Der ‘Libellus auro praestantior,’” and Wriedt, “Ist der ‘Libellus’ eine Lutherschrift?”

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(3:1, 4): “All things have their season . . . a time to weep, and a time to laugh.”⁴⁵ In his Lectures on Ecclesiastes of 1526, Luther makes it clear that the operative time concept in this passage is the qualitative one of kairos (which, incidentally, is the word used by the Greek Septuagint to translate the Hebrew eth “time”).⁴⁶ Making a distinction between the activities listed and the time for doing them, Luther comments that the former are “instituted or done by human design” (humano consilio instituta vel facienda) whereas the latter lies “outside of human control” (extra facultatem humanam) and is determined by God; if humans seek to do something when it is not the time, the enterprise must fail.⁴⁷ God appoints the season for everything, and the season for salvation is the present time of this life, or, as Luther says in an echo of the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, the Godgiven “now” that is “a time of blessing, an acceptable year, a time of grace.”⁴⁸

3. Hear and believe “Christ’s kingdom is a kingdom for hearing [ein hoͤr Reich], not a kingdom for seeing [ein sehe Reich].” Luther makes this statement in the course of arguing that the spiritual and heavenly Kingdom of Christ is no less present “down here on earth” than the Kingdom of the World which people see all around them; the difference is that it presents itself to the ears alone: “Although we do not see his kingdom as we see the worldly one, we hear it nonetheless. How indeed? ‘Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength.’ ⁴⁵ Libellus auro praestantior, ed. Schottroff, 100–1: “[Diabolus] tunc non nisi peccata praeterita, & horrorem mortis, poenamque inferni furorem irae divinae & insustentabilis iudicii omni iudicio & mira astucia coram ponit, ut homini cogitationem arripiat, & in istis malis haerere faciat, ne sit memor bonorum domini. . . . Si itaque vel conscientia dictet vel diabolus negocium faciat in morte, de peccatis, de inferno, de ira dei. Respondendum est. Hoc nunc non est agendum, & breviter dicendum. Tempus flendi, tempus ridendi . . . Omnia enim suum tempus habent.” A more distant parallel to Luther’s argument, but which does not make any explicit reference to the notion of a right season, is in the death chapter in Heinrich Seuse’s Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit: Eternal Wisdom tells her disciple that he should contemplate the image of the unprepared dying youth “assiduously as long as you are still young, as long as you are still hale and hearty, and as long as you can still make amends. But,” the lesson continues, “when truly you really come to your last hour and there is no possibility of amendment, you should contemplate nothing on earth except my death and my bottomless mercy so that your hope will remain entire.” Büchlein 21, DS 286, lines 23–8; Exemplar, trans. Tobin, 274. The same advice is given in Seuse’s Latin version, Horologium sapientiae 2.2, ed. Künzle, 539, lines 4–10. ⁴⁶ In the Septuagint, “season” in Eccl 3:1 is chronos kai kairos; “time” in the following verses is kairos. ⁴⁷ Luther, Lectures on Ecclesiastes, on Eccl 3:1 and 3:14, WA 20:58–9, 65; LW 15:49, 55. ⁴⁸ Luther, Roths Sommerpostille, sermon on the Gospel for the 13th Sunday in Trinity, Lk 10:23–37, WA 10, pt. i, bk. 2:358: “Als woͤlt er sagen [Luther is glossing Christ’s words to his disciples Lk 10:23: “Blessed are the eyes that see the things which you see”]: Yetzt ist ein selige zeyt, ein angenaͤms jar, ein zeyt der gnaden.” Cf. 2 Cor 6:2: “For [God] saith: In an accepted time [kairō dektō] have I heard thee and in the day of salvation have I helped thee. Behold, now is the acceptable time [nun kairos euprosdektos]: behold, now is the day of salvation.” In Luther’s German New Testament (1522 version), “accepted time” and “acceptable time” are translated as “genehme zeyt” and “angenehme zeyt.”

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[Ps 8:2(3) Authorized Version] . . . For the eyes do not guide and lead us to where we shall find Christ and make his acquaintance, it is rather the ears that do this, but truly such ears as hear the Word from the mouth of babes and sucklings.”⁴⁹ It is apparent from this last statement that the terms “hoͤr Reich” and “sehe Reich” are intended to capture something more than the simple fact that one kingdom is perceived by hearing whereas the other is perceived by sight; they additionally indicate that each sense is the only appropriate one in its allotted realm. Seeing has nothing to contribute to “finding Christ and making his acquaintance” in this earthly life, and hearing has no role in the pursuit of worldly goals and activities. When Christians hear the Word of God preached in the church or repeated in the celebration of the sacraments (these are Luther’s concretizations of what is meant by “hearing the Word from the mouth of babes of and sucklings”), they do not see the things of which the preacher speaks, or the new birth and the liberation from hell that are promised in the sacraments: they simply hear the words and choose to believe them.⁵⁰ Conversely, so far as the securing of worldly wealth and happiness is concerned, “ears have no part in your becoming rich; rather it is the eyes and the fists that let you select the task and set about it.”⁵¹ The collocation of eyes and fists as the agents of selection and execution respectively makes it plain that Luther not only connects seeing with doing, but regards it as an aspect—the planning and preparatory aspect—of doing; beneath the surface opposition of hearing and seeing there turns out therefore to be a more fundamental opposition between hearing on the one side and action on the other. Luther formulates this contrast explicitly in his commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians. In that epistle, Paul accuses the Christian communities in Galatia of succumbing to the false belief that righteousness is conferred by the performance of works prescribed by the Old Testament law, such as the Jewish ritual of circumcision; he asks his addressees pointedly: “Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law or by the hearing of faith?” (Gal 3:2). For Luther, the answer to the question may be found in the story of Christ’s visit to the sisters Martha and Mary in Bethany. When Martha complains to Christ that she has all the work of looking ⁴⁹ Luther, Sermon on Psalm 8, preached at Merseburg, August 6, 1545; the passage from which the quotations are taken reads in full as follows: “Diese zwey Reich sind hie unten auff erden unter den leuten, denn auch Christi Reich hie unten auff erden unter den leuten ist und gehet, Aber da ist ein grosser unterscheid, das, wiewol die beide, Christi und weltlich Reich, auff erden sind und gehen, so werden sie doch ungleicher weis regirt und gefuͦrt. Denn der Koͤnig, da hie der Psalm von saget, ob wol er auff erden sein Reich hat [the sermon is an exegesis of Psalm 8, “O Lord, our Lord, how admirable is thy name in the whole earth”], so regirt er doch Geistlich und auff Himlische weis also, das, ob man wol sein Reich nicht sihet, wie man das weltlich sihet, so hoͤrets man dennoch, Ja wie? ‘Aus dem munde der jungen kinder und Seuglingen hastu ein macht zugericht’, [Ps 8:2] Und ist Christi Reich ein hoͤr Reich, nicht ein sehe Reich. Denn die augen leiten und fuͦren uns nicht dahin, da wir Christum finden und kennen lernen, sondern die Ohren muͦssen das thun, aber auch solche oren, die das Wort hoͤren aus dem mund der jungen kinder und seuglingen.” WA 51:11. ⁵⁰ Ibid., WA 51:12. ⁵¹ Ibid.: “ . . . das du reich werdest, da gehoͤrn nicht ohrn zu, sondern das thun augen und feuste, das du es mit dem werck für dich nemest und angreiffest.”

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after him while her sister does nothing but sit at his feet and listen to his words, he replies: “Martha, Martha, thou art careful and art troubled about many things: But one thing is necessary. Mary hath chosen the best part, which shall not be taken away from her” (Lk 10:41–2). Luther comments: “A Christian is made therefore not by doing works but by hearing [non operando, sed audiendo]. For which reason whoever wishes to busy himself in the matter of becoming righteous should busy himself in the first place with hearing the Gospel; having heard and accepted it, let him rejoice and give thanks to God, and then busy himself with doing the good works that are prescribed by the law, in such a way that the law and works are attendant upon hearing the faith.”⁵² In everything that pertains to attaining righteousness, Mary shows the way; Luther recurs to her example in a sermon on the proposition that Jesus is the true Christ sent by God (Jn 7:24–9): “When dealing with conscience, sin, life, death or indeed God, be mindful and let go of everything to do with the world. Send Martha to wash pots in the kitchen. But Mary recollects: ‘It is not fitting that I should seek after works and merit, but only to listen to his mouth and believe his word.’ Then it strikes home with her, then his mouth speaks nothing but sweet words that invigorate and refresh her heart.”⁵³ Luther’s insistence on the utter irrelevance of works to the great transcendental questions of sin, life, death, and God explains a very striking aspect of Lutheran meditation on the last things which sets it apart from the devotional cultures that preceded it and also challenged it through the initiatives of the Catholic CounterReformation: the failure to develop any system of spiritual exercise comparable to Bonaventure, or the Devotio Moderna, or Ignatius Loyola.⁵⁴ The failure is not one of exhortation: Lutheran writers continually urged and directed their readers to remember their last end in a regular and disciplined fashion; it is rather that these exhortations and directions are not elaborated into formal systems or regimens of

⁵² Luther, Commentary on Galatians, 1535 version, WA 40, pt. i:345: “Christianus ergo fit non operando, sed audiendo. Quare qui sese exercere vult ad iustitiam, Primum exerceat se audiendo Euangelio, hoc audito et concepto laetus agat gratias Deo et tum se exerceat bonis operibus quae sunt in lege praecepta, Ita, ut Lex et opera sequantur auditum fidei.” LW 26:214–15. For the textual history of the Commentary, and also the lectures on which its various versions are based, see the editor’s introduction, WA 40, pt. i:1–7. ⁵³ Luther, Sermons on the Gospel of St John 6–8, sermon on Jn 7:24–9, July 1531, WA 33:393, manuscript text H: “wen man handeln soll mit dem gewissen, mit der sunde, Leben, tode oder auch mit Gott handeln, so gedenck und laß alles in der welt fahren. Laß Martha in die kuchen gehen, Topff waschen. Aber Maria gedenckt: es gehort mir zu, nit werck und verdienst suchen, sondern nur seinem munde zuzuhoren und seinem wortt zu gleuben, dan trifft sie es, sein mundt redet dan eittel süsse wortt die ihr hertz erquicken und laben.” Cf. LW 23:247–8, which follows the printed version E. There is an exegetical tradition reaching back to the Church Fathers that equates Martha and Mary with the active and contemplative lives respectively; often the two are regarded as complementary, but in the later Middle Ages a tendency emerged, which Luther and other reformers continued, to evaluate the sisters independently of one another; see Constable, “Mary and Martha,” 113–30. ⁵⁴ Even present-day advocates of ecumenical rapprochement who argue that Ignatius Loyola and Luther were drawing on the same kind of religious experience are obliged to concede that the latter never devised or prescribed any method for recreating that experience through systematic spiritual exercise. See Henkel, Geistliche Erfahrung, 35–6.

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spiritual exercise. To do so would be tantamount to prescribing a work in an area where hearing and believing are deemed to be the only necessary thing; hence it comes about that Lutheran instructions for remembering the last end are characterized by an almost total indifference to the mechanics, the epistemology, and the psychology of meditation. The handbooks and manuals of eschatological remembrance scarcely ever lay down any ordered sequences of meditative activity (“first imagine x, then imagine y”), nor do they promote any theory to explain the status (phantasm, spiritual vision, etc.) of what is present to the mind during meditation; they also make no attempt, beyond the most general references to the heart or mind as the locus of inwardness, to specify the organs or powers of the soul (eyes of the soul, inner senses, imagination, intellect, etc.) that are supposedly engaged in the act of meditation.⁵⁵ All of these aspects, which together constitute the theory and the practice of traditional spiritual exercise, are (to pick up Luther’s disdainful metaphor) so much pot washing, to be relegated to the kitchen in favor of the “best part” chosen by Mary: “That’s the trick!” exclaims Luther, as he comments on Christ’s validation of Mary’s choice: “Only hear, that part alone does it.”⁵⁶ Given the theological background, it is remarkable that there should have been any initiative at all to devise Lutheran spiritual exercises for remembering the last end. A rare example, notably from the early period of the Reformation, before the first wave of creedal and institutional consolidation in the 1530s, is Caspar Güthel’s Tröstliche Sermon (Consoling sermon) of 1523. The text, which instructs the reader in the art of dying well by way of an extended commentary on the gospel story of the sickness and death of Lazarus (Jn 11:1–27), describes and justifies an exercise in meditatio mortis with typically Lutheran arguments about death as the most important of the last things. Death is the only door that leads from this life into everlasting life; it is the fulfillment of the covenant of baptism, which promises that the baptized will be remade on the day of resurrection without any blemish or defect of sin; above all, it is a gift of divine grace requiring no contribution from humans except “to learn and to know and to rehearse [uͤben] a willing, good, and blessed death.”⁵⁷ The rehearsal or meditatio (the Latin noun

⁵⁵ It is the case however that Luther recommended a systematic and orderly method of prayer. In the letter-cum-treatise Wie man beten soll of 1535, WA 38:351–75 (A Simple Way to Pray, LW 43:193–211), Luther shared his own practice for the benefit of his addressee, his old friend Peter Beskendorf; each of the Ten Commandments and major Articles of Faith is to be expanded into a fourfold devotional act: first, consideration of the meaning; second, thanksgiving; third, confession; fourth, prayer. ⁵⁶ Luther, Sermons on the Gospel of St John 6–8, sermon on Jn 7:24–9, July 1531, WA 33:392: “Das ist der griff, alleine hoͤren, das stuck thuts alleine.” LW 23:247. Luther cites Luke 10:42 in the Latin of the Vulgate Bible, which refers to the optima pars, the “best part,” which Mary has chosen; the text however fluctuates in this respect between the variants “good,” “better,” “stronger,” “best”; see Constable, “Mary and Martha,” 5–6. Luther’s German translation opts, like the Authorized Version, for the “good part.” ⁵⁷ Caspar Güthel, Ein tröstliche Sermon (VD16 G3996), a[4]r–b[1]v; “zuͦ lernen / zuͦ wyssen / vnd zuͦ uͤben / gantzwillig / wol / vnnd seeligk sterben” (b[1]v). For the author (1471–1542), a fellow Augustinian and acquaintance of Luther, see Reinis, Art of Dying, 194–6.

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can have the same meaning) consists in contemplating the example set by Christ, whose own death overcame the “three terrifying images” of sin, death, and hell: these should be contemplated not in themselves, but in the images of grace, life, and heaven respectively which are present in the image of Christ on the cross.⁵⁸ This is of course the very same exercise in relational seeing that Luther had recommended for the deathbed in his Sermon von der Bereitung zum Sterben, and indeed Güthel incorporates whole passages from that work into his own treatise; the difference is that the kairos principle of remembering good things in the time of evils has been disregarded, and the recollection of the goods of grace, life, and heaven is to take place in the prime of life, the better to be ready for the last hour when it finally comes.⁵⁹ Güthel’s initiative was stillborn: the Tröstliche Sermon was not reprinted, and subsequent attempts to rework Luther’s deathbed advice as an exercise for lifelong remembrance of the last end were few and far between.⁶⁰ Another near contemporary source, Johannes Brenz’s pamphlet Wie man sich christenlich zu dem Sterben bereiten soll (How one should prepare for death in a Christian manner), first published in 1529 and in print until the early 1560s, already shows where the future normative center of Lutheran meditatio mortis would come to settle.⁶¹ Brenz deploys the traditional metaphor of the steps on the ladder by which a person ascends to God, but defines the steps in a manner that could not be more different from the medieval model of graded exercises for the reformation of the ⁵⁸ Güthel, Ein tröstliche Sermon, b2r–[4]r. ⁵⁹ Ibid., b2v: “Darumb ist von notten / am leben / yetzt zuͦ lernen / vnd sich zuͦ uͤben / die sünde / den Todt / vnd die Hellen (dieweyll sie noch ferre syndt) woll anschawen / auff dass wir sye alß denn am thodt bette / yn solchem hefftigen sturm vnd geschoß / mügen verachten vnd versagen.” (Therefore it is necessary to learn and rehearse now, during life, the thorough contemplation of sin, death, and hell, while they are still remote, so that we may then despise and reject them on the deathbed when the battle and the arrows are thickest.) On Luther’s Sermon, see above, 217–19, and, for Güthel’s textual dependency on it, Schottroff, Bereitung, 55–6; Reinis, Art of Dying, 203–8. ⁶⁰ At the end of the century, Paul Jenisch mentions the desirability of installing an “image of death” (Todtenbilde) in every room and chamber of every house, not however to be contemplated in and of itself, but alongside the consoling “image of life [Bild deß Lebens] in our lord and savior Jesus Christ” (Seelenschatz, 446). It is difficult to know exactly what Jenisch is recommending because of two indeterminacies in his account; whether the image of Christ is a real artefact, or a mental picture evoked in contemplation of the physical image of death; and whether contemplation of the two images in relation to each other is meant to occur in a period of time purposely set aside from the routine of daily life, or whether Jenisch envisages a brief and spontaneous mental event that is triggered whenever a person happens to pass by death’s image. In general, Luther’s scheme of the three harmful images and their antidotes remained confined to the hour of imminent death, as Luther himself had intended; see for example Andreas Osiander the Elder, Unterricht an einen sterbenden Menschen, Gesamtausgabe 6:487–97; Culmann, Trostbüchle, 136v–137v; Leonhard Werner, Seelentrost (VD16 W 2079, Nuremberg 1556), 8r–12v; Andreas Musculus, Das güldene Kleinod (VD16 L 3497, Erfurt 1561), A [6]r–C2v (the text is an abridgment of Luther’s Sermon); Heinrich Knaust, Sterbens Kunst (VD16 B 430, Frankfurt/Oder 1561), A5r–B1v; Matthaeus Kolzeburg, Trostbüchlein (VD16 K 1973, Wittenberg 1572), H5r–J4r. ⁶¹ Brenz, Wie man sich christenlich zu dem Sterben bereiten soll (VD16 B7973). There were ten further editions down to 1562. See Schottroff, Bereitung, 60–2 and, for the author’s life (1499–1570) and works (he was a leading figure in the establishment of the Lutheran Reformation in Württemberg), Fehle, Johannes Brenz.

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soul. Referring to the passage in the Gospel of John (1:51) where Christ identifies himself with the ladder that Jacob saw in his dream, Brenz insists that the only way to ascend to heaven is through faith in Christ, which he likens to a domestic staircase: “Whoever is at the bottom of the house and desires a convenient means of reaching the top will not manage it by jumping or flying, but must climb in an orderly fashion, one step at a time, from the bottom to the top.”⁶² The “orderly” ascent is laid out in five steps, but these are not the spiritual ascents of a Bonaventure or Gerard Zerbolt, for whom each step constituted an exercise in a progressive sequence that would gradually reform the soul’s denatured faculties and restore it to the image of God.⁶³ Only the third and fourth steps (hear Christ’s preaching; believe it) prescribe anything for humans to do at all; the three others describe either measures taken by God to facilitate salvation (he predestined a part of humanity for salvation; he sent his son into the world to proclaim this) or the effect that believing will have on sinners (they will become righteous through their faith and win eternal life).⁶⁴ The two human steps moreover could not be further removed from spiritual exercise of the Bonaventuran type: in the place of complex ascents and gradations of purgation, illumination, and unification, they center the totality of salvific meditatio mortis around the two simple acts of “hearing the preaching of the son, our Lord Jesus Christ” and “believing the preaching.”⁶⁵ Hearing and believing are the exemplary core of Johannes Sutell’s Historia von Lazaro (History of Lazarus; 1543), the published version of a series of twelve sermons on the gospel narrative of the raising of Lazarus (Jn 11:1–54). This story, Sutell announces at the outset, teaches the proper Christian way of meditatio mortis which monks, in their failure to emphasize Christ’s promise of salvation, have perverted.⁶⁶ And it teaches by example, through the figure of Martha, who according to the gospel narrative hears Jesus’s words “I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in me, although he be dead, shall live” (Jn 11:25), and answers his question “Believest thou this?” with her own words: “Yea, Lord: I have believed that thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God, who art come into this world” (Jn 11:27). Commenting on this verse, Sutell declares that Martha has become “a wholly new person” (gantz ein new Mensch) through Christ’s word and her faith: whereas she was previously troubled by “many useless and vain thoughts” (vielen vnnuͤtzen vnd vergeblichen gedancken), she now has a preacher whose word has taken root in her and burgeoned forth in the “beautiful ⁶² Brenz, Wie man sich christenlich, B4r: “wer ye vnden im hauß ist / wil er fuͤglich hinauff kommenn / so wirt es nit mit springen oder fliegen zuͦgeen / sonder er muͦß ordenlich von vnden an / biß zuͦ oberst von einer staffeln zuͦ der andern hynauff steigen.” ⁶³ See Chapter 1, 31–8; Chapter 4, 173–84. ⁶⁴ Brenz, Wie man sich christenlich, B4r–5r. ⁶⁵ Ibid.: “die predig des suns vnsers herrn Jesu Christi hoͤrenn”; “glauben an die predig.” For the Bonaventuran system of the three ways, purgative, illuminative, and unitive, see Chapter 1, 31–2. ⁶⁶ Sutell, Historia von Lazaro, first sermon, B2v. According to the title page the sermons were delivered in 1542. Sutell (1504–1575) was a leading figure in the Reformation at Göttingen and Schweinfurt; see ADB 37:196–7.

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confession” (schoͤne bekenntnis) “I have believed.”⁶⁷ She is therefore the model of a properly Christian meditatio mortis, which contrasts with the deficient practices of both the pagan ancients and the Christian monks: she performs no spiritual exercise, but simply hears and believes. The fact that the model attitude is now exemplified by the same Martha whom Luther wanted to dispatch to the pots in the kitchen does not authorize the conclusion that Sutell has a diametrically opposite understanding of the sisters to Luther’s. The apparent transvaluation is in fact simply a reflection of the circumstance that the sisters appear in a different constellation in this story to the one in which they were presented in the account of Christ’s visit to Bethany in Luke 10. In that story, Martha and Mary display contrasting behaviors, the one busy, the other still and contemplative, whereas in the story of Lazarus they are alike in their expression of grief and anger at the death of their brother. First Martha, then Mary reproaches Christ with the identical words “Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died” (Jn 11:21, 32). Any difference between them is purely temporal: Martha, having gone out of the house to meet Christ (Jn 11:20), is the first to be persuaded by her faith to set aside her reproaches. It is this narrative circumstance that allows her, rather than her sister, to embody the exemplary attitude in this instance.⁶⁸ In the second half of the sixteenth century, hearing and believing became established as the normal instruments for remembering the last end among Lutherans. At a time when Jesuit activity in Germany was giving a new lease of life to the scenarios, epistemologies, and psychologies of traditional spiritual exercise, Lutheran “formulas” and “precepts” for remembering the last end centered upon the activation of a Bible-based faith whose outward manifestation is described in ideal terms as a habitus of repentance and morality.⁶⁹ According to Andreas Musculus, the proper way for a Christian to remember the last end is to recite “joyfully and with a glad heart the words of our beloved Paul, ‘For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain’ [Phil 1:21],” and “in addition [Sirach’s injunction] ‘memorare novissima’ must here also mean considering and contemplating how ⁶⁷ Sutell, Historia von Lazaro, fifth sermon, Q3v–[4]r. ⁶⁸ Jn 11: 20: “Martha, therefore, as soon as she heard that Jesus had come, went to meet him: but Mary sat at home.” It is possible to read into this a contrast between Martha’s activity and Mary’s passivity, and to argue that it is precisely because Martha is active that she is the first to hear and believe Christ’s words. Sutell’s interpretation does not however highlight any contrast between the sisters; on the contrary, he insists they are both alike as examples of faith that has been weakened by grief and affliction (Historia von Lazaro, fifth sermon, N[4]r). Luther, in a sermon on Jn 11:1–45 preached in 1518, emphasizes this same similarity between the sisters (WA 1:276; LW 51:48). ⁶⁹ The Jesuits were organized in German lands from the middle of the sixteenth century; the standard history is still Duhr, Geschichte der Jesuiten; for more recent treatments, see also the essays in Decot, Konfessionskonflikt. Latin editions of Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises were printed in the German-speaking lands from the early 1560s (vernacular translations do not appear until the second half of the seventeenth century); see the relevant entries in the VD16 and VD17 databases. The activity of the Jesuits provoked a considerable body of anti-Jesuit propaganda by Lutherans; see Paintner, Des Papsts neue Creatur.

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one may prepare and ready oneself for [the last] day in the Word as preached now, in the time of grace and the day of salvation”—in other words, hear and believe because the kairos is at hand.⁷⁰ Paul Jenisch explains to his readers that “our greatest art” (vnsere groͤste Kunst) is to believe the words of 1 John 3:2, even though we do not yet see or understand what God promises us by them: “We are now the sons of God: and it hath not yet appeared what we shall be. We know that when he shall appear we shall be like to him: because we shall see him as he is.”⁷¹ Joachim von Beust’s “precepts” for the art of dying well lead with “Love God’s Word and fear the Lord,” progress through the moral principles “Live in sobriety,” “Do penance,” “Receive the Lord’s Supper very frequently,” and end with “Pray to God for a happy exit from world.”⁷² Georg Kuppelich’s “Formula for how a Christian should daily make himself ready and prepare for the death of the body” comprises an introductory cento of quotations, examples, and Bible verses on the inevitability of death, followed by a long stage-by-stage explanation of the process of repentance: first, the recognition and confession of sins; then faith in Christ within the strict parameters of the biblical Word (this according to Kuppelich is what sets Lutheran Christians apart from Catholics); finally, a new obedience, which consists in the assiduous implementation of the fruits of faith in one’s daily routine: fearing and loving God, displaying a genuine and active love of one’s neighbor.⁷³ The aversion that Lutherans felt from anything that smacked of spiritual exercise is at its most palpable in the book that was destined to become the runaway bestseller of Lutheran meditatio mortis in early modern times: Martin Moller’s Manuale de praeparatione ad mortem (Handbook of preparation for death). First published in 1593 and continuously in print until the end of the 1770s, it was written (notwithstanding its Latin title) in plain German and laid out in accessible dialogue format “for simple laypeople.”⁷⁴ Moller recommends a ⁷⁰ Musculus, Bedencks Ende, D2r: “mit froͤlichem vnnd frewdigem hertzen sagen / mit dem lieben Paulo / Christus ist mein leben / vnd sterben mein gewin”; D4v: “es mus hie auch heissen / memorare nouissima / das man daneben auch bedencke vnd betrachte / wie jtzunder im gepredigten wort in der zeit der gnaden / vnd am tag des heils / man sich zu solchem tag fertig vnd bereit mache.” ⁷¹ Jenisch, Seelenschatz, 475. ⁷² Beust, Enchiridion, pt. 1, “De præceptis nonnullis observandis, vt bene beateque ex hac vita terrestri in cœlestem migrare possis,” 4r–48v: “Verbum Dei Ama & Dominum time,” “Sobriè viue,” “Pœnitentiam age,” “Cœna Domini sæpius vtere,” “Deum precare pro felici exitu ex hoc mundo.” The precepts are the titles of the chapters that make up this first part of the handbook. ⁷³ Georg Kuppelich, Bet- und Trostbüchlein (1559, VD16 K2581; cited in the 1576 edition, VD16 K2582), title of chap. 6: “Form / wie sich ein Christ taglich zum leiblichen Tod schicken vnd bereit machen solle”; the anti-Catholic polemic, which centers on the acceptance of scripture as sole authority, is on N[1]r–[3]r. ⁷⁴ Moller, Manuale (VD16 M6040; cited in the 1596 edition, VD16 M6041), preface, C[8]v: “fuͤr die einfeltige Laͤyen.” VD16 and VD17 record thirty-eight further editions down to 1700; VD18 does not currently include all the eighteenth-century editions, but a search of the Karlsruhe Virtual Catalog (KVK: http://kvk.bibliothek.kit.edu, accessed October 10, 2019), yielded a further twenty-two down to 1777; the work was still being printed occasionally in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (including one edition for the use of German-speaking Lutherans in the United States; see note 30 of

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“daily study in the art of dying” and even outlines the syllabus when he identifies the four “unknowns” (incerta) surrounding death—time, place, circumstance, manner—as “truly weighty matters on which you should thoroughly meditate daily.”⁷⁵ Moreover, copious study materials are provided, on the four unknowns as well as on a series of questions relating to the afterlife: the destination and condition of the souls of the dead while their bodies are rotting in the grave; the certainty of bodily resurrection; the joys of heaven; the sufferings of the damned in hell. The materials consist of Bible verses, creedal and dogmatic propositions, and also prayers which, alternating between prose and verse, help the eager learner to articulate a willing acceptance of death, the wish to avoid dying with unrepented sins on one’s conscience, the soul’s yearning to be with Christ in heaven, the sure and certain anticipation of the resurrection, contrition, and entreaties to Christ to help with leading a good life and dying a good death so as to escape everlasting torment in hell.⁷⁶ Nowhere however does this impressive pedagogical project recommend any kind of spiritual exercise for meditating on the last things; on the contrary, Moller insists that “the right preparation for a good death is a daily Christian life of repentance.”⁷⁷

4. A winding-sheet for the soul The eighth chapter of Moller’s Manuale begins when the author’s imaginary interlocutor asks to be provided with “several maxims from God’s holy scriptures, so that I may familiarize myself with them, be comforted by them at my end, and refresh my soul.”⁷⁸ Consolatory maxims or “Trostsprüche” had become an institution among Lutherans by the end of the sixteenth century. Excerpted from the Bible and committed to memory for recollection in times of affliction and danger, when a person’s faith might be placed under strain, as well as in quiet moments of reflection and meditation, “Trostsprüche” were the specific materialization of the the Introduction for details); there are also seventeenth-century translations into French and Icelandic. For further information about the Manuale and its author, who held positions as pastor in Saxony and Upper Lusatia, see NDB 18:1; Althaus, Gebetsliteratur, 134; Axmacher, Praxis Evangeliorum; Beck, Erbauungsliteratur, 262–4; Karant-Nunn, Reformation, 162–6; Schottroff, Bereitung, 95–6. ⁷⁵ Moller, Manuale, 3r: “Das sind warlich erhebliche Stuͤcke / die du taͤglich wol bedencken solt.” According to Moller, the scheme of the four “unknowns” is based on a saying of the ancients, namely: “Quatuor circa mortem sunt incerta, nimirum tempus, locus, status, modus” (ibid.); the tag in fact probably found its way into sixteenth-century discourse via the Speculum morale, the fourteenthcentury addition to Vincent of Beauvais’ Speculum maius, which in turn took it from Stephen of Bourbon, Tractatus 1.7.4, ed. Berlioz and Eichenlaub, 1:284. ⁷⁶ Moller, Manuale, 3v–7r, 124v–147r. ⁷⁷ Ibid., 8v: “Die rechte bereytung zu einem seligen Ende ist ein taͤgliches / Christliches / bußfertiges leben.” ⁷⁸ Ibid., 102v: “So erzehle mir nun etliche Spruͤche aus heyliger Goͤttlicher Schrifft / das ich sie mir bekandt mache / mich damit an meinem Ende troͤsten / vnd meine Seele laben moͤge.”

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Word as it was heard and believed in situations where, to paraphrase Luther, a Christian was confronted with the ultimate questions of “conscience, sin, life, death, and also God.”⁷⁹ In the context of remembering the last end, “Trostsprüche” offer a particularly striking illustration of normative centering as a “phenomenon of reducing and simplifying complex systems”:⁸⁰ on the one hand, they perpetuate the long-established practice of textually instigated and textually programmed meditation; on the other hand, they narrow the range of texts and textually mediated propositions down to one alone. “Trostsprüche” for remembering the last end are almost exclusively biblical, and their propositional content draws the meditator’s attention relentlessly on to the positive context in which the calamities of death, damnation, and hell are to be recollected: that of life, grace, and heaven in and through Christ. The “Trostsprüche” that Moller provides in response to his interlocutor’s request are typical in this respect; his list of twentysix maxims (several of which are abridgments or epitomes of entire books and chapters of the Bible) includes such firm Lutheran favorites as Job 19:25 (“I know that my redeemer liveth, and in the last day I shall rise out of the earth”) and John 5:24 (“He who heareth my word and believeth him that sent me hath life everlasting: and cometh not into judgment, but is passed from death to life”).⁸¹ Having delivered the list as requested, Moller explains that these verses, which have “passed through the mouth of God,” are a more efficacious comfort than the outwardly splendid but substantially flimsy confections of human rhetoric; hence it is from divine words such as the ones just enumerated that readers should prepare a “winding-sheet” for their souls, well ahead of time, and so that they will have it ready for whenever their last hour comes: From these and other consolatory maxims, dear soul, select a number that will comfort you most pleasantly, familiarize yourself with them thoroughly, as with the holy Lord’s Prayer. Indeed, just as it is the custom to prepare a winding-sheet several years in advance and to keep it until it is needed to wrap the corpse, in the same way you should select a number of particular maxims for yourself, and ⁷⁹ For the Luther citation, see note 53 to this chapter. By the end of the sixteenth century, around twenty collections of “Trostsprüche” had been published under titles such as “Trostbüchlein für Kranke und Sterbende” (Little book of consolation for the sick and dying); many were reprinted multiple times. In addition, numerous Lutheran books on death and dying contained at least a chapter with suitable biblical maxims. To date, only the use of “Trostsprüche” around the deathbed has been the object of sustained scholarly attention, because it is a continuation and development of the late medieval ars moriendi practice of invoking Bible verses and exempla as a defense against the devil. For the inclusion of such material in the fifteenth-century illustrated ars moriendi, see Rudolf, Ars moriendi, 71–4; on the earliest Lutheran anthology of Bible maxims for consoling the dying, Johannes Odenbach’s Trostbüchlin für die Sterbenden (1528, VD16 O240), see Althaus, Gebetsliteratur, 37–9; Beck, Erbauungsliteratur, 190–1; Reinis, Art of Dying, 179–88; Schottroff, Bereitung, 72–4; Resch, Trost, 103–10. Bible verses were also part of the official last rites prescribed by Lutheran church ordinances; see Karant-Nunn, Reformation, 150–5. ⁸⁰ Hamm, “Normative Centering,” 7. ⁸¹ Moller, Manuale, 103v–112r; the two cited verses are at 104v and 106r–v.

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learn their meaning thoroughly, so that you may be able to wrap your soul in them at the last end and preserve it. For then the mind is often failing, and memory diminished; one cannot listen to long sermons, nor does one heed the florid and ornately plumed words of rhetoric; but a maxim or word of consolation from the mouth of God delights, soothes, nourishes, and refreshes heart, body, and soul. Aus diesen vnd ander Trostspruͤchen / liebe Seele / liese dir etliche aus / welche dich am lieblichsten troͤsten / Mache sie dir wol bekandt / wie das heylige Vater vnser. Ja gleich / wie man etliche jar zuvor pfleget das Todtengerethe fertig zu machen / vnd zu verwahren / biß mans darff / den Leichnam hinein zu huͤllen: Also erwehle dir etliche gewisse Spruͤche / vnd lerne sie wol verstehen / auff das du an deinem Ende deine Seele hinein huͤllen / vnd mit Troste verwaren kanst. Denn da wirdt offtmals der Verstandt geringe / das Gedaͤchtniß nimpt abe / da kan man nicht auff lange Predigten hoͤren / Man achtet auch nicht der verbluͤmeten / Rhetorischen gefiedderten Worte / Sondern ein Trostspruch / ein Trostwort / das durch den Mundt Gottes gangen ist / Das erfrewet / labet / speyset / erquicket Hertz / Leib vnd Seele.⁸²

Moller’s choice of metaphor is unusual, but it conveys the same idea as the military metaphorics of arming, stockpiling, and provisioning that were the standard currency of the discourse: believers should use the “time of grace” to learn by heart and study a selection of Bible verses, so as to be ready for death whenever it comes.⁸³ The practical instructions for doing this comprise a range of possibilities which make allowance for various degrees of effort, expertise, and capacity for reflection. At one end of the scale is the fairly minimal activity envisaged by Moller for his readership of “simple laypeople”: they should select especially appealing verses and commit them to memory;⁸⁴ at the other end there is a mode of theologically informed meditation that takes the form of composing written interpretations of the verses in question. The latter was the practice of Luther himself, whose preparation for his own death was disseminated as a model through the print versions of the various sermons and orations that were preached ⁸² Ibid., 112r–v. ⁸³ Some examples, which it would be easy to multiply: Brenz, Wie man sich christenlich, A2v (biblical maxims are the “sword by which death is slain”; Brenz develops his metaphor from Paul’s call in Eph 6:11 to “put . . . on the armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the deceits of the devil”); Johannes Spangenberg, Ein neu Trostbüchlein (1542, VD16 S7873), B3r (consolatory maxims from the Bible are like the arrows in the archer’s quiver, stockpiled and ready for deployment as needed); Christoph Vischer the Elder, Trostschrift (1570, VD16 V1706), J[7]v–[8]r (they are our “shield and protection” against the devil’s “murderous arrows,” and everyone should lay in a store of them); Philipp Kegel, Geistliche Kampfschule (1597, VD16 K 592), A3r–v (maxims are the “defenses and weapons” for Christians to deploy in the “art of spiritual fencing” against the devil). ⁸⁴ Similarly basic programs are recommended by Spangenberg, Ein neu Trostbüchlein, B3r; Lucas Lossius, Ewiger, wahrhaftiger und göttlicher Trost (1556, VD16 L2771), 102, and Culmann, Trostbüchle, 120r–v.

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about his life and death. In an oration delivered on February 19, 1546 while Luther’s coffin was on display in Eisleben, Justus Jonas declared that it was a sign of the great man’s “special grace and recognition of God” that he had begun preparing for death “a whole year beforehand; he wrote into his psalter and prayer book, which he always carried with him, over twenty consolatory maxims [Trostspruͤche], as if he wanted to say, ‘When the time comes, with God’s help I will take up one of these maxims in the last hour of my death and be armed with it against Satan and all the gates of hell’ ”; the first of these maxims, Jonas continues, was 1 Peter 5:7 (“Cast all your care upon God, for he careth for you”), a “noble and consoling maxim” whose choice proves that “this righteous and dear man Martin, Doctor of Divinity, truly did cast all his care upon the Lord Christ in his hour of death, not asking or caring where he would end, but leaving the care of his soul to God, to whom he had commended it, for him to look after and preserve”; a further New Testament verse written into the prayer book was Matthew 19:17 (“If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments”), accompanied by an interpretation that in Jonas’s estimation is a testimony to Luther’s genius as a commentator of the Bible: “Keep the commandments; that is: ‘die.’ For it is ordained that everyone shall and must die; therefore if you wish to follow this maxim and enter into life, die, and you will have kept God’s commandment, and will live . . . Thus the verse is expounded excellently and eloquently, yet who would have thought to intepret it so masterfully as to say that keeping God’s commandments meant dying?”⁸⁵ In between the extremes of simple memorization on the one hand and ingenious exegesis on the other there existed further possibilities. Sometimes, authors equipped their readers with rudimentary principles of biblical hermeneutics which would allow them to derive the correct consolatory message from any given verse; Johann Pfeffinger’s Trostbüchlein über den unzeitlichen Tod ⁸⁵ Justus Jonas and Michael Coelius, Zwo tröstliche Predigt (VD16 J899), B2r: “Das ist nu auch ein besonder gnad / vnd erkentnis Gottes / von dem Manne gewesen / das er sich zum abscheid vnd tode bereitet hat / ein gantz jar zuuor / Hatt in sein Psalterium vnd Betbuͤchlin / das er stets mit sich genomen / vber zwentzig Trostspruͤche geschrieben / der meinung / als wolt er sagen / Ich wil dermal eins / mit Gotts huͤlff / in meiner letzten Todstunde / der Spruͤche einen ergreiffen / vnd damit wider den Satan / vnd alle pforten der Helle geruͤst sein”; B2v: “Dem edelen vnd trostlichen Spruch nach / hat der frome tewre Man D. Doct. Martinus / alle seine sorge auch auff den Herrn Christum geworffen / inn seiner Todstunde / vnd nicht gefraget noch gesorget / wo er bleiben werde / Sondern hat Gott sorgen lassen fur seine Seele / die er jm beuohlen / wie er die werde versorgen vnd erhalten”; B[4]v–C1r: “Wiltu zum leben eingehen / so halt die Gebot Gottes / das ist (stirbe) Denn es ist beschlossen / das alle Menschen sterben sollen vnd muͤssen / derwegen wilt du dich nach diesem Spruch halten / vnd zum leben eingehen / so stirb / so hastu das Gebot Gottes gehalten / vnd wirst leben . . . Also ist nu auch der Spruch fein ausgelegt vnd wolgeredt. Wer wolt doch den Spruch dahin so meisterlich gedeutet haben / das die Gebot Gottes halten / hiesse / sterben?” Jonas quotes two further maxims from Luther’s psalter (which has not survived), one from Ambrose and another supposedly addressed by Christ to a dying bishop (ibid., B3v–[4]r). Luther’s psalter, with its “vil troͤstlicher spruͤche” written into it, is also mentioned by Coelius in his oration on Luther, delivered the day after Jonas’s on February 20, 1546, and printed together with it (ibid., G1v), and again by Johannes Mathesius in his cycle of sermons on Luther’s life first published in 1566 (sermon 14, Ausgewählte Werke 3:360).

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(Book of consolation for untimely death; 1552) concludes with a chapter “On Application,” in which he explains that Old Testament verses are to be referred to their fulfillment in the New Testament, and that the principle of correct interpretation must always be to seek God’s will as it is revealed in the gospel.⁸⁶ For those who lacked either the skill or the confidence to attempt their own interpretation, collections of verses were available with ready-made commentary: mainly the author’s own, but occasionally reproducing interpretations by other, better known writers, including Luther himself.⁸⁷ It was in fact Luther who was instrumental in encouraging the institution of the “Trostspruch” through his practice of writing Bible verses, accompanied by interpretation, into other people’s books—Bibles, prayer books, psalters, friendship and autograph books—at their request; these “grapho-relics,” as they have been called, signed and dated in his own hand, constituted for their owners an authentic physical trace of the divinely inspired individual whom God had chosen to mediate and expound his Word;⁸⁸ collections of them also circulated in print versions, beginning with the two published in 1547, the year after Luther’s death, by his Wittenberg associates Johann Aurifaber and Georg Rörer.⁸⁹ Well-educated persons might make their own handwritten collections of favorite verses: it is recorded, for example, that Prince Bernhard VII of Anhalt-Zerbst (1540–1570) kept a book in which he wrote Bible verses in Latin as well as German, which added together provided him with “consoling testimonials” (troͤstliche gezeugnis) to the resurrection of the body and eternal life.⁹⁰ The inscription was not necessarily on paper. Bernhard’s sister, Maria of Anhalt-Zerbst (1538–1563), was particularly fond of two verses, Psalm (90)

⁸⁶ Johann Pfeffinger, Trostbüchlein über den unzeitlichen Tod (VD16 P2339), 77r–78v. For the author (1493–1573), see ADB 25:624–30. ⁸⁷ Examples of collections of maxims with ready-made exegesis (sometimes by Luther) are: Lucas Lossius, Trostschrift (1556, VD16 L2791), 4v–27r; Caspar Franck of Joachimsthal, Ein Trost wider das grawen und schrecken für dem Tode und Grabe, in Nicodemus Kramer, Trostbüchlin (1561, VD16 K2219), K5v–M3v; Nicodemus Kramer, Steg und Weg, O[6]r–S4r; Kolzeburg, Trostbüchlein, C[7]v–F [6]v; Bartholomäus Gernhard, Trostbüchlein (1589, VD16 G1597), 10a–20b; Kegel, Geistliche Kampfschule, 90–119. Culmann, Trostbüchle, also offers commentaries on a couple of the verses in his anthology. ⁸⁸ Rublack, “Grapho-Relics,” 145, 155. These entries have been collected and edited as “Bibel- und Bucheinzeichnungen Luthers” in WA 48:1–224. The practice forms part of a wider early modern culture of personal relations mediated through autograph books and alba amicorum; see Schnabel, Stammbuch. ⁸⁹ For details of these collections and their early printing history, see the introduction to WA 48:xv– xxii, xlii–xlvii. ⁹⁰ From the funeral oration for Bernhard delivered by pastor Johannes Gese and reproduced in Bruno Quinos, Disce mori (1577, VD16 Q69), 162v–164v. The verses in question, which Gese claims to have transcribed from the prince’s autograph notebook, are Hos 13:14; Is 26:19; 1 Cor 15:20–2; Lk 18:29–30; Gal 4:6–7; Phil 3:20–1; Jn 11:25; Rom 8:31–2; Rom 14:7–9; Phil 1:21; Jn 5:24; Is 25:8; Jb 19:25–7; 1 Cor 15:42–4. Quinos’s anthology of funeral orations for prominent Lutherans was one of several that were compiled in the later sixteenth century with the aim of providing readers with examples of how to live and die like good Christians; see Guthke, Last Words, 162–7; Moore, Patterned Lives, 116–19.

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91:15 (“He shall call upon me, and I will answer him: I will be with him in trouble; I will deliver him, and honor him”) and Isaiah 41:10 (“Fear thou not, for I am with thee: be not dismayed, for I am thy God: I will strengthen thee: yea I will help thee; yea I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness”), and had them engraved on two drinking cups in order to demonstrate “that she took a special pleasure in them and wished to be reminded of their beautiful consolation every day”;⁹¹ Prince Wolfgang of Anhalt-Köthen (1492–1566) presented Bernhard’s sister in law with a painting of a coffin surrounded by verses from Simeon’s Song, the Nunc dimittis (Lk 2:29–32) and the words of Job (19:25) “I know that my redeemer liveth,” so that “as a young godfearing princess Her Grace should be constantly reminded in her young years of the supreme wisdom”; he also had a similar picture hanging by his bed, where for a period of fifteen years it gave him a daily prompt to remember and reflect on his last end.⁹² The practice of turning domestic space—its artefacts, artworks, even its surfaces—into a constant reminder of the last end is elevated to the status of a programmatic imperative in Johann Leon’s Handbüchlein von diesem Jammertal seliglich abzusterben (Little handbook of blessed departure from this vale of tears) of 1560. Because, the author reasons, this life is transient and uncertain, everyone should ceaselessly meditate on God’s decree that all humans must die; Joseph of Arimathea, who had his own tomb hewn in rock when he was still alive (Mt 27:60), is held up as an example for everyone, especially rich people, to follow: they should “set up similar memorials [gedenckmahl] in their halls, summerhouses, and gardens, and in place of many godless, heathen, and scandalous mottos and verses have the following maxims or similar ones written and painted there”; as indicative samples, Leon appends rhymed couplet paraphrases of Job 14:1–2 (“Man born of woman, living for a short time, is filled with many miseries. Who cometh forth like a flower, and is destroyed, and fleeth as a shadow, and never continueth in the same state”), Isaiah 40:6–7 (“All flesh is grass, and all the glory thereof as the flower of the field. The grass is withered, and the flower is fallen”), and Sirach 14:12 (“Remember that death is not slow, and that the covenant of hell hath been shown to thee”).⁹³ Inscribed in this way, the material environment of house and garden becomes a book of eschatological remembrance in whose pages the residents are compelled to read.

⁹¹ Quinos, Disce mori, 117r: “das sie sonderliche freude daran gehabt / vnd sich also dadurch Teglich des schoͤnen Trostes daraus erinnern wollen.” Both verses are cited in the English of the Authorized Version, which is closer to Luther’s German than the Douay-Rheims Vulgate. ⁹² Quinos, Disce mori (1582 edition, VD16 Q71), 286v–287r. This is an expanded version of earlier editions, which did not include Wolfgang. ⁹³ Johann Leon, Handbüchlein von diesem Jammertal seliglich abzusterben (1560, VD16 L1211), C4v: “Diesem Joseph solten alle menschen sonderlich reiche leuthe folgen / in jrhe Saalstuben / Lustheuser / vnd Garten / dergleicheu gedenckmahl machen / vnd an statt vieler Gottloser Heidnischen schandbaren wort vnnd Reimen lieber schreiben vnd mahlen lassen / diese vnd dergleichen Spruͤche.” For the author (d. 1597), see ADB 18:298–9.

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The choice of verse, the means of storing and inscribing as well as retrieving them—these are all variables. Individuals had their personal favorites, which could be so intimately associated with them as to be perceived by others as their identifying “sign or watchword” (Symbolum oder reim), as Bruno Quinos, a great documenter of “Trostspruch” practice among the Lutheran elite, called these signature verses; examples he cites are Philipp Melanchthon (Rom 8:31: “If God be for us, who is against us?”) and Bernhard of Anhalt (Ps (26) 27:4: “One thing I have asked of the Lord, this will I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life; that I may see the delight of the Lord, and may visit his temple”).⁹⁴ The maxims might be committed to memory, written down in a prayer book or psalter or private notebook, inscribed on walls, objects, artworks; they might be deliberately recalled from memory or read over, or they might commandeer the believer’s attention through the kind of contrived obtrusion that Johann Leon envisaged with his scheme for placing “memorials” to mortality in the domestic environment in such a way that the inhabitants could not help but stumble upon them. Consolatory maxims moreover infiltrated the consciousness and above all the language of educated Lutherans to such an extent that people were capable of sustaining entire conversations consisting of nothing but verses from the Bible. Such conversations were kept up even on the deathbed (thereby proving that individuals had indeed stockpiled their arms and provisioned themselves for the hour of greatest need), and are recorded in funeral orations as a testimony to the exemplary Bible-based piety of the deceased, who had evidently taken to heart some version of the advice that Luther reportedly gave about laying in a copious store of verses, so as never to be lost for at least one Word.⁹⁵ Thanks to her knowledge of the scriptures, the dying Countess Anna of Barby (d. 1575) was able to complete any of the verses that her pastor began reciting to her;⁹⁶ Bernhard of Anhalt’s capacity for maintaining the “Christian practice” of talking in Bible quotations “constantly and without growing tired of it” right up to the very end is attributed to the sound habits of his youth, when “it was ever his custom either to have consoling conversations from God’s Word always, or to ⁹⁴ Quinos, Disce mori, 84v, 155r–v. ⁹⁵ Luther’s advice is reported by Veit Dietrich in his preface to a collection of “Trostsprüche” by the Coburg pastor Johann Grosch; allegedly, Luther “knew from his experience how even the familiar maxims with which we are to comfort ourselves may elude us and refuse to come to mind. Therefore it is very good for us to have a secure stock from the scriptures, so that if any particular maxim be not powerful enough, we may seek out another that is pure, clear, and certain and gives us our footing” (erfahren hatte / wie auch die wolbekandten Spruͤche / damit wir uns troͤsten sollen / sich verlieren und nicht woͤllen einfallen. Da ist es sehr gut / das wir einen gewissen vorrath auß der Schrifft haben / ob der vnd jener Spruch nicht wolte starck genug sein / das wir einen andern suchen / der lauter klar vnd gewiß sey / vnd darauff wir fussen koͤnnen; Johann Grosch, Trostsprüche, ca. 1560, VD16 ZV30422, A3r). Another edition of Grosch’s anthology was published by Nikolaus Selnecker (1561, VD16 G3420); it has a different preface and also commentaries and prayers to accompany the Bible maxims. Both editions were reprinted several times down to 1600. Selnecker also made a Latin translation, which predates the German editions (1553, VD16 G3424). ⁹⁶ Quinos, Disce mori, 198r.

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have the Word read to him without cease”;⁹⁷ Christian III of Denmark (d. 1559) added his own “habitual maxims” (gewoͤhnliche spruͤche) from the Bible to those of his pastors and theologians, giving his own interpretations of them, and thereby revealing to everyone “that he had taken them well to heart”;⁹⁸ Melanchthon (d. 1560) was able to keep up a responsorial mode of deathbed conversation, replying to a citation from Romans 8:1 (“There is now therefore no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus”) with a corresponding verse from 1 Corinthians 1:30 (“But of him are you in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom and justice and sanctification and redemption”), and to a plethora of verses read to him by the pastor and his deacons with one verse that he claimed he had always before him: “His own received him not. But as many as received him, he gave them power to be made the sons of God, to them that believe in his name” (Jn 1:11–12).⁹⁹ Underlying all this variability and copiousness there is however a fundamental sameness about “Trostsprüche.” Almost without exception, they are taken from one source, the Bible.¹⁰⁰ They always serve the same purpose, which is to stimulate faith by directing a person’s attention to the most important fact concerning death, namely that it has been overcome. They always make the same theological and eschatological statement: God’s universal death sentence will be commuted to everlasting life for all who believe that Christ died for their sins and rose again from the grave. Above all, they assign the individual, however much she may be identified with a particular verse as her personal “sign or watchword,” to the same community of believers who show remorse for their sins and are confident that Christ’s redemptive sacrifice has ensured that these same sins will not be counted against them at the final reckoning. The individuality of different choices, the variability of the modes of storage and retrieval, the copiousness of supplies—it is always a matter of choosing this or that version, or this or that way of inscribing, or a larger or smaller quantity of the same thing. Precisely this essential quality of sameness in difference was what Abraham Ulrich, the Lutheran Superintendent of Zerbst, had in mind when he attended the dying Prince Carl (1534–1561) and was obliged by circumstances to adjust his pastoral script. Noticing that the prince’s hitherto considerable appetite for conversing in Bible verses was diminishing, and fearing that a surfeit of maxims and exhortations might only confuse him as the

⁹⁷ Ibid., 183v: “Wie er aber allezeit zuuor im gebrauch gehat / das er stets aus Gottes wort / entweder Troͤstliche gesprech hatte / oder aber ohn unterlas lesen liesse / Also ist er folgend diese gantze zeit vber / bis auff seinen Seligen abschiedt / Tag vnd Nacht in solcher Christlichen vbung / bestendiglich ohn vberdrus verharret.” ⁹⁸ Ibid., 43v–44r. The maxims in question were Mt 11:28; Jn 14:6; Jn 17:3. ⁹⁹ Quinos, Disce mori, 80v–82r. ¹⁰⁰ A rare and salient exception appears to be Luther himself. The list of “Trostsprüche” that he wrote into his psalter, which has been reconstructed from references in Jonas’s and Coelius’s funeral orations and also from Luther’s recorded table talk, includes patristic as well as biblical citations; see the list in WA 48:266–8.

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final agony approached, Ulrich decided to get him to concentrate his thoughts on one short verse at a time, such as Romans 10:13 (“Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved”); his justification for the change of tactic was that “one maxim is as sure as a thousand.”¹⁰¹ The principle of sameness in difference reveals the distance between the Lutheran institution of the “Trostspruch” and the Devotio Moderna practice of the rapiarium with which it otherwise has an affinity. Both published and private collections of “Trostsprüche” resemble rapiaria, inasmuch as they contain excerpts of found text recomposed in a new order and context; the excerpts convey a “point” that provides a focus for devotion; users of the collection may pick out whatever text appeals to them and meditate on it.¹⁰² Yet whereas the New Devout cannibalized a whole range of sources for their rapiaria—scriptures, Church Fathers, postpatristic authors such as Bernard of Clairvaux—Lutherans took their maxims exclusively from the Bible; whereas the New Devout meditated on all kinds of points relating to the last things and Christ’s passion in their manifold details and aspects,¹⁰³ Lutherans meditated on their Bible maxims with one thought only in mind: that death, sin, and hell had been overcome by Christ and replaced with life, grace, and heaven for all who believed in him. Most significantly, Lutheran practices of excerpting text and inscribing it afresh, whether on paper, metal, wood, or canvas, in the heart or in memory, were not allied to a concomitant process of reforming the inner person. The soul that Lutherans wrapped in a winding-sheet of Bible verses was every bit as deformed by original sin as Bonaventure and his Devotio Moderna followers thought it to be; the difference was that Lutherans did not consider it susceptible of being reformed and restored to its prelapsarian condition and order.¹⁰⁴ No longer the target of restorative intervention, the soul was instead the locus of contrition and also of hope, an inwardness capable of being touched by the Word with its message of law and grace: the divine law that humans invariably transgress against and renders them worthy of damnation, and the divine grace that forgives and saves them.¹⁰⁵ In Moller’s metaphor, the winding-sheet does not reverse the

¹⁰¹ Quinos, Disce mori, 98v: “Denn ein Spruch ist so gewis / als tausent.” ¹⁰² Even though Devotio Moderna houses existed throughout northern and central Germany at the time of the Reformation and were known to Luther and his associates, it is not necessary to posit a genetic relationship between Devotio Moderna rapiaria and Lutheran “Trostspruch” collections; it is more likely that both practices were adapted from the widespread study practice of keeping a notebook. See the literature cited in note 29 of Chapter 4; also, for German Reformers’ encounters with the Devotio Moderna, Van Engen, Sisters and Brothers, 306–7, 316–17. ¹⁰³ See section 2 of Chapter 4, esp. 163, 166–70, 171–3, 174–81, for the last things; on programs for bringing different aspects of the passion and the last things into consciousness on different days of the week, see van Dijk, “Wochenpläne.” ¹⁰⁴ For the Bonaventuran schema “formed, deformed, reformed,” see Chapter 1, 60 with note 157, 63; Chapter 4, 170. ¹⁰⁵ The antinomy of law versus grace was fundamental to Luther’s understanding of the Bible. See his Prefaces to the Old and New Testaments: WA Bibel 6:2–11, 8:10–32; LW 35:235–51, 357–62.

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corruption it enwraps, it “preserves” (verwaren) the soul, keeping it as it is while at the same time, like the cloak of alien righteousness which the weave of Bible words connotes and resembles, making the soul presentable for its appointment with its judge.

5. “Learn a new language” The consoling language of the Bible was not contained solely within the maxims that a person remembered, wrote down, encountered, recited, and reflected upon. Lutheran writers encouraged believers to go a step further, to take the language of the Bible out of the confining frame of citation and let it permeate the language of their everyday discourse. In this way, even the most casual of speech acts referring to death and the fate of the dead would become a remembrance of the last end under the all-important aspect of life, grace, and heaven. Martin Moller explains that death and the grave are a terrifying prospect only if they are considered in relation to the Law, which makes everyone a sinner and condemns him to everlasting punishment in hell; they appear in a different light, however, if they are considered under the aspect of the Gospel, with its message that all will be saved who believe that Christ has fulfilled the requirements of the Law on their behalf; in that case, death and the grave are not something to be feared, but the welcome passage to eternal life.¹⁰⁶ This consoling perspective on the last end is acquired by “learning a new language”: Yet against [the terrors of death and the grave] the children of God should learn an entirely other, new language, and see how the holy Gospel speaks of these matters. For it calls the death of the faithful a sleep, and the grave a chamber of rest. For seeing as Christ suffered the punishment of death for us, suffered the anguish of hell for us, satisfied the requirements of God’s justice for us, and obtained life for us, the Holy Spirit truly suspends the hateful names and consoles his believers in the Gospel with another, new language. For the Lord says, “Go, my people, enter into thy chambers, shut thy doors upon thee, and hide thyself a little for a moment, until the indignation pass away” [Is 26:20]; and again, “Many of those that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake” [Dn 12:2]; and Christ himself says, “Lazarus our friend sleepeth; but I go that I may awake him out of sleep” [Jn 11:11]; and again, “The damsel is not dead, but sleepeth.” [Mk 5:39] And in the story of the passion it says likewise: “Many bodies of the saints that had slept arose.” [Mt 27:52]

¹⁰⁶ Moller, Manuale, 95v–96v.

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Dagegen aber / sollen die Kinder Gottes gar eine andere newe Sprache lernen / vnd sehen / wie das heylige Evangelium hievon redet / Denn dasselbige nennet den Todt der Gleubigen einen Schlaff / vnd das Grab ein Ruhekaͤmmerlein. Denn weil Christus die Straffe des Todes fuͤr vns erduldet / Die Angst der Hellen fuͤr vns gelitten / Der Gerechtigkeit Gottes fuͤr vns genug gethan / vnd vns das Leben erworben hat / So hebet der Heylige Geist auch im Evangelio die heßliche Namen auff / vnd troͤstet seine Gleubigen mit einer andern newen Sprache. Denn so spricht der HERR: Gehe hin mein Volck / in eine Kammer / vnd schleuß die Thuͤr nach dir zu / Verbirge dich einen kleinen Augenblick / biß der Zorn fuͤruͤber gehe. Vnd abermahl: Viel so vnter der Erden schlaffen ligen / werden auffwachen. Vnnd Christus spricht selber: Lazarus vnser Freundt schlefft / vnd ich gehe hin / das ich jhn auffwecke. Vnd abermahl: Das Kindt ist nicht gestorben / sondern es schlefft. Also sagt auch die Historia der Passion: Es stunden auff viel Leibe der Heiligen / die da schlieffen.¹⁰⁷

The recourse to this “new language” of the Gospel and Holy Spirit (which, as Moller’s examples show, might be heard in the Old Testament no less than in the New) was by no means unique to Moller. From the earliest years of the Reformation, Luther and his followers had drawn on the Bible’s language of sleep and repose in order to speak of death and the condition of the dead. The appeal of this language for Protestants was threefold. In the first place, it provided them with an authoritative means for refuting the traditional doctrine of purgatory and the devotional and cultic practices associated with it: if the dead are sleeping peacefully in their beds, it follows that they are not undergoing excruciating purification in the fires of purgatory, but merely resting until the time comes for them to awake again.¹⁰⁸ Alongside this polemic or apologetic function, the language of sleep and awaking had a pastoral use, as a source of comfort to the sick and dying; it was being used in this capacity from at least the late 1520s, for example in Jacob Otther’s handbook Christlich leben und sterben (Christian living and dying) of 1528, which recommends as “consoling sayings” (troͤstlich wort) verses such as “Lazarus our friend sleepeth” (Jn 11:11), “I have slept and taken my rest: and I have risen up, because the Lord hath protected me” (Ps 3:6), “For if we believe that Jesus died, and rose again; even so them who have slept through Jesus, will God bring with him” (1 Thes 4:13).¹⁰⁹ The third reason for the language’s importance to Protestants was theological. “Sleep” occupied a crucial place in Luther’s eschatology because it was a horizon-word; by this I mean that its use with reference to death reconfigures what might otherwise be understood solely as the absolute end of life as also a boundary that permits one to form a concept of ¹⁰⁷ Ibid., 96r–v. ¹⁰⁸ See Marshall, “After Purgatory,” 35–6. ¹⁰⁹ Jacob Otther, Christlich Leben und Sterben (VD16 O1467), m3r–v. On this work, see Reinis, Art of Dying, 225–37; Resch, Trost, 47–51.

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what lies beyond it.¹¹⁰ The word “sleep” is able to perform this function thanks to its semantics: it describes a temporary state which ends when the sleeper awakes; Luther insists on this aspect repeatedly when glossing or commenting on references to the sleeping dead in the Bible. These are, he maintains, assurances of the life which is to come, for “sleep is not the name for someone who is dead, but for someone who will surely rise”;¹¹¹ Christians, who are the sleeping members of the body which is the church, may be certain of resurrection because Christ, the body’s head, has already awoken from death (this is Luther’s interpretation of 1 Corinthians 15:20: “Now Christ is risen from the dead, the firstfruits of them that sleep”);¹¹² the sleeping person, whose body is unreceptive to sensations while the soul is dreaming, provides an example (“exemplum”) of how it will be in death, when “the soul will gaze upon the Word and think only of faith; this is why ‘dying’ is called ‘sleeping’ in the scriptures”;¹¹³ Abraham’s bosom, the place where angels carry the dead beggar’s soul in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Lk 16:22), is nothing other than God’s Word, which is a guarantee and promise of resurrection; those who die firmly believing fall asleep in the Word, which preserves and shelters them as if in a bosom.¹¹⁴ When Moller tells his readers to “see how the holy Gospel speaks” of death and the grave, he means something more than that they should consider the word “sleep” and the implications of its usage in the scriptures. He continues: Learn therefore, dear soul, to embrace this new language of the Gospel with fresh devotion. See: through his death the Lord has changed your dying into a gentle falling asleep, and made of your grave a neat little bed for you to lie on. When you die, the word for it is “fall asleep,” when you are laid in your grave, it is “go to bed,” when the grave is filled with earth, it is “shut thy doors upon thee,” when your body decays, the words for it are “rest” and “hide until the indignation pass away.” So lerne nun / liebe Seele / diese newe Evangelische Sprache / mit newer Andacht fassen / Sihe / der HERR hat durch seinen Todt / dein Sterben in ein sanfftes

¹¹⁰ On this definition of the horizon in medieval philosophy and theology, see Chapter 2, 74–5 with note 32. For the significance of sleep in Luther’s eschatology, see Althaus, Die letzten Dinge, 146–8, and especially Asendorf, Luther und die Eschatologie, 285–93, who shows that Luther’s constant figuring of death as a sleep from which one awakes has the effect of presenting the end under the aspect of a transitus. ¹¹¹ Luther, Sermon for the Feast of the Visitation of Mary with Elizabeth, preached on July 1, 1538, WA 46:470: “Das heist nicht schlaf, der tod ist, sed qui certo resurget.” ¹¹² Luther, Sermon for 20th Sunday after Trinity, preached on October 13, 1532, WA 36:547–8. ¹¹³ Luther, Sermon for Judica Sunday, preached on April 2, 1525, WA 17, pt. i:169, Rörer text: “Huius exemplum habemus in dormiente, cuius corpus iacet ut truncus, anima autem nullam illius tunc curam agens suis intendit Phantasiis et ludit, imagunculis delitiatur et omnino ita agit, quasi non sit nec pertineat ad corpus. Corpus quoque, quod suum est, facit, dormit enim. Sic erit in morte: anima verbum aspiciet et intendit soli fidei corpore interim moriente. Hac causa ‘mori’ in scriptura ‘dormire’ dicitur.” ¹¹⁴ Luther, Sermon on the Rich Man and Lazarus for 2nd Sunday after Trinity, preached June 22, 1522, WA 10, pt. iii:191, text II.

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Einschlaffen verwandelt / vnd dir dein Grab zu einem seuberlichen Ruhbetlein gemacht. Wenn du stirbest / heisset es einschlaffen: Wenn du ins Grab gelegt wirst / heisset es zu Bette gehen: Wenn man zuscharret / heisset es die Thuͤr nach dir zuschliessen: Wenn dein Leib verfaulet / heisset es ruhen / vnd dich verbergen / bis der Zorn fuͤruͤber ist.¹¹⁵

Readers are thus equipped with a glossary of the new language which does not, however, function like any normal vocabulary list or phrasebook designed to help users move between a language they already know and one they do not. For the glossary is not so much a list of translations as it is a list of the Holy Spirit’s “suspensions” or “annulments” (aufheben) of the familiar vocabulary of “death,” “grave,” “decay,” and so on. Accordingly, for Moller’s readers it is not really a question of learning the new language so as to be able to translate into and out of their native idiom as and when occasion demands it; learning a new language means in this case unlearning the old “hateful names” and replacing them with their new biblical counterparts. Thus, language acquisition is simultaneously also a deacquisition, which the learner executes in order to make room in her language for God’s Word and the perspective on reality it conveys. Other writers concur. Caspar Franck of Joachimsthal exhorts his readers to adopt the “fine evangelical manner of speaking” (feine Euangelische weise zu reden) that the prophet Daniel employs when referring to the dead as “those that sleep” (Dn 12:2);¹¹⁶ they should follow Daniel’s example by minding their language and forbearing to utter any of the profane idioms for death and dying that abound in slang and vulgar speech: We Christians should therefore retain these lovely, sweet, consoling words, lest we speak facetiously of the demise of those that sleep, as is the habit of the godless and ignorant: “He’s gone to the diet of worms,” “He’s gone to Peg Trantum’s,” “He’s piked off,” “He’s stuck his spoon in the wall.” No. The phrase is: “He has fallen asleep.” St. Paul calls death “departure,” “dissolution” [Phil 1:23]; St. Peter calls it “laying away the tabernacle” [2 Pt 1:14], etc. Derwegen sollen wir Christen solche freundliche / holdselige / vnd troͤstliche reden behalten / auff das wir nicht von absterben der schlaffenden schimpfferlich reden / wie die Gottlosen rohen leut zu thun pflegen Er ist in die alte welt gezogen / Er ist in die alte marck gegangen / Er ist zum [Kap]ores / jm ist der loͤffel entfallen / Nein / es heist er ist entschlaffen. S. Paulus nent sterben abscheiden / auffgeloͤset werden / S. Petrus die Huͤtten ablegen etc.¹¹⁷

¹¹⁵ Moller, Manuale, 96v–97r. ¹¹⁶ Franck, Trost, L1v. ¹¹⁷ Ibid., L2r. All of the colloquialisms are otherwise attested for early modern German; “Kapores” is corrected from “Trores,” which is probably a misprint (cf. the locution Kapores gehen, “die, perish”). I have tried to match them with equivalent sayings from English historical slang.

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Paul Jenisch similarly recommends the substitution of one way of speaking for another. Noting that God says through the mouths of his prophets and apostles that the righteous shall “rest in [their] bed[s]” (Is 57:2) and “rest from their labors” (Rv 14:13), he concludes that “for this reason a faithful person may truthfully say ‘I do not die, but must lie down to sleep and rest’ ”;¹¹⁸ he then extends the principle to a general admonition to “reform one’s tongue” when speaking of the dead: Whenever death takes someone who is beautiful, learned, expert, eloquent, or hale and hearty, it is generally the case that most people say, “Oh, what a pity that this excellent man should rot, when there was still so much good he might have accomplished; what a pity that this beautiful body should turn to dust; what a pity that these charming eyes, this attractive mouth, this eloquent tongue, this learned head, these skilled and artful hands should decay.” John Chrysostom declares that this is no way for a Christian to talk, who ought rather to say, “One day this beautiful body will arise more splendid and beautiful still; some day these beautiful feet will leap beyond the clouds; some day these charming eyes will contemplate God face to face; in the next life this attractive mouth will speak far more elegantly and praise God in all eternity,” etc. That is the way for a Christian to frame his words and reform or correct or improve his tongue. Vnd zwar inn gemein / wenn der Todt schoͤne / gelehrte / erfahrne / wol beredte / gesunde vnnd starcke Leut wegnimpt / so sagt mancher: Ey es ist jmmer schad / das der fuͤrtreffliche Mann / der noch vil gůts hette koͤnnen außrichten / solle verfaulen: es ist schad / das der schoͤne Leib vermoderen soll: schad ists / das die holdselige Augen / der liebliche Munde / die wol beredte Zunge / der gelehrte Kopff / die geschickte vnnd kunstreiche Haͤnde faulen sollen. So soll ein Christ / spricht Chrysostomus / nicht reden: sondern soll vil mehr sagen: der schoͤne Leib wirdt dermalen einest noch herrlicher vnd schoͤner aufferstehen: Dise schoͤne Fuͤsse / werden einmal vber die Wolcken hinauß springen: Die liebliche Augen werden einmal GOtt von Angesicht zu Angesicht anschawen: Der holdselige Mund / wirdt dort in ienem Leben vil zierlicher reden vnd GOtt loben in alle Ewigkeit / etc. Der gestalt soll ein Christ seine reden anstellen / vnnd also seine Zunge reformieren oder corrigieren vnnd verbesseren.¹¹⁹

¹¹⁸ Jenisch, Seelenschatz, 473: “Derowegen kan ein glaubiger Mensch mit der Warheit sagen: Ich sterbe nicht / sondern ich muͦß schlaffen gehen vnnd außruͦhen.” ¹¹⁹ Ibid., 480. Jenisch refers to John Chrysostom’s homily on 1 Thes 4:13: “But I would not have you ignorant concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not,” in which the bereaved are enjoined not to mourn their loss but rejoice instead in the splendor of the coming resurrection; the homily provides a general argumentative frame, but says nothing specific about how one is to speak of loss and bereavement. Cf. John Chrysostom, Homilies on 1 Thessalonians 7, PG 62:436–40. 1 Thes 4:13 became a locus classicus in Lutheran discussions of funeral etiquette, starting with Paulus von Rode’s Tröstliche Unterweisung of 1527 (VD16 V2429–37, ZV11923–4).

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Among Lutheran theologians there is a noticeable vacillation over whether the biblical appellation “sleep” describes death as it actually is or merely provides the human understanding with an analogy for gaining a partial insight into an otherwise obscure and unintelligible condition. Grammatically and rhetorically speaking, in the former case the word would be a literal designation, whereas in the latter it would be an instance of nonliteral usage based on the principle of likeness: a simile or metaphor for death.¹²⁰ The vacillation is already present in Luther’s own discussions of the sleep of death, in a way moreover which suggests that the status of the appellation depends on the point of view from which biblical usage is being understood. From the quotidian perspective of ordinary language and the knowledge and experience encoded in it, “sleep” is predicated nonliterally of death so as to suggest an informative analogy; thus, in order to discourage inappropriate curiosity about the souls of the righteous dead (where exactly are they? how did they get there?), Luther draws a comparison with the state of being asleep: “It is enough for you to know that they are in God’s hands . . . Since you have still not learned what goes on with you when you fall asleep or wake up, and can never know how close you are to sleeping or waking, even though these are daily experiences for you, how would you find the answer to these other questions?”¹²¹ The analogy here is epistemological: being dead is like being asleep inasmuch as both states are incontestably part and parcel of everyday human existence without yet being fully accessible to human understanding. There is however another perspective from which the word “sleep” is not an analogy, but the name for death as it really is. That perspective is reserved to God alone, although it may be communicated to humans. The fact that Christ only had to utter the imperative “arise” (surge) to bring the widow of Nain’s dead son back to life (Lk 7:14–15) proves for Luther that if you are God, the dead are not in fact dead at all, but sleeping and therefore susceptible of being woken; this perspective is moreover encoded in the language that God chooses to employ in

¹²⁰ Rhetorical theory since Aristotle has regularly defined the simile as the explicit unpacking of a comparison that is implied by a metaphor, and the metaphor as a truncated or abbreviation of a simile: “death is like sleep” expands and parses the metaphorical predication “death is sleep,” which in turn elides the comparative particle of the simile. See Aristotle, Rhetoric 3.4 [1406b–1407a], trans. Freese, 366–71; Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 8.6.8, trans. Butler, 3:304–5; for discussion Lausberg, Handbuch, sections 558, 843–7; Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor, 26–30. Some modern theories of metaphor reject this traditional connection between simile and metaphor, pointing out that the statement “death is like sleep” is always true in its literal assertion, provided that there is some property that death and sleep have in common, whereas the metaphor “death is sleep” is always literally false; see Martinich, “Theory for Metaphor.” ¹²¹ Luther, Adventspostille, Sermon for second Sunday in Advent, WA 10, pt. i, bk. 2:117–18: “Es ist gnug, das du wissest, sie sind ynn gottis handen . . . syntemal du noch nicht erlernett hast, wie dyr geschehe, wenn du entschleffist odder auffwachist, und kanst nymmer wissen, wie nahe dyr der schlaff odder das wachen sey, damit du doch teglich umgahist, wie woltistu denn diß erfaren?”

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his communications with humans: “For that reason, it is not called death for our Lord God, but for us; for God it is a sleep so gentle that it could not be gentler, and he wishes to imprint this on our minds so that we are not afraid when plague or death comes.”¹²² In God’s language, “sleep” is the literal designation of what humans know by the name “death”; it follows that whoever learns this new language of divinity and makes it their own will undergo a realization not dissimilar to the one that comes over the meditator of the thirteenth-century “Treatise on Virtues” who, from the perspective of her daily excursions into eternity, realizes that the vocabulary of human language as it is ordinarily applied to life and death in this world does not signify the true reality.¹²³ Both explanations of the language in which the Bible speaks of death, the analogist and the literalist, are represented in the Protestant theological and devotional literature that flourished in the half century after Luther’s death. Those writers that adopt an analogist position argue from the perspective of human language, and explain the appositeness of the Bible’s appellations by invoking the principle of likeness. Death is fittingly called “sleep” (or one of the other names the Bible gives it) because it resembles what we ordinarily understand by and associate with the word in some important respect. The principle is on plain display in Melchior Specker’s extensive discussion of the Bible’s various names for death in his treatise Vom leiblichen Todt (On the death of the body) of 1560. Proceeding philologically and systematically (each appellation is listed in Latin, Greek, and German, and backed up with attestations), the expository discourse is articulated by means of a syntax of comparative conjunctions, adverbs, and verbs whose function is to posit equivalence. The name “dissolution,” for example, is explained in terms of a similarity between embodied life and forced containment; quoting from Anselm’s commentary on Philippians 1:23 (“But I am straitened between two, having a desire to be dissolved and to be with Christ, a thing by far the better”), Specker states that the weak and corruptible body is the fetter from which a person will be released at death “in the same way as” (gleich als) from a heavy shackle; the analogies multiply when it is next stated that the Bible “likens” (vergleicht) the body to an oppressive burden and a wretched habitation from which the soul yearns to be free, and finally that the body is “like” (wie) a thick dark wall separating humans from God and the angels on the other side; all these objects of comparison—shackle, habitation, wall—may be induced to dissolve and disintegrate, like the corruptible and mortal body whose

¹²² Luther, Sermon for 16th Sunday after Trinity, preached on September 28, 1533, WA 37:150: “Ideo heissts fur unserm herr Gott nicht tot, sondern fur uns, fur Gott ists so ein leyser schlaff, das er nicht leyser sein kunde, Das wil er uns einbilden, das wir nicht erschrecken sollen, quando venit pestis vel mors.” ¹²³ See section 2 of Chapter 2, esp. 106–8, and below, 250–2.

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demise the righteous long for.¹²⁴ The same strategy is employed to explain and justify the Bible’s use of “sleep.” Specker adduces a whole series of similarities and comparisons: God is able to awake humans from death “just as easily as” (eben so leichtlich . . . als) humans rouse each other from their beds; the weary laborer looks forward to rest and sleep, “and likewise” (also . . . auch) death will be a sweet and gentle sleep for the faithful after the travails of earthly life; “just as” (wie) a sleeping person awakes and has no awareness of having previously fallen asleep or for how long, “likewise” (also) the dead will rise from the grave without any notion of having died.¹²⁵ Although Specker nowhere says it, his syntax of comparison implies that the words “sleep” and “dissolution” must be either similes or metaphors of death. His younger contemporary David Chytraeus is explicit that the appellations in question are metaphors. An academic theologian like Specker, he treats the language of the Bible as an object of philological inquiry and explication; in his Libellus de morte et vita aeterna (Little book on death and eternal life) of 1581 he comments extensively on a long list of “Christian names for death” (Christianae appellationes mortis), evincing throughout a keen awareness that the words in question represent a special usage whose tradition, meaning, and rhetorical function it is his task to elucidate. They are “appellations for the death of the righteous which are usage in the Word of God” (appellationes Mortis piorum, in verbo Dei vsitatae);¹²⁶ they are therefore specific to the discourse of divine and divinely inspired persons, and distinct from ordinary human language because they are used by God, Christ, Moses, the prophets, and the apostles for the purpose of dispelling doubt and inspiring consolation among believers: Isaiah affirms in an expression taken from Moses that those people whom the world calls “dead” and “extinct” are indeed GATHERED TO THEIR PEOPLE and ENTERED INTO PEACE and “resting in their beds” [cf. Is 57:2; Gn 25:8; 25:17; 35:29; 49:32], and thus really are alive, in order that we should not entertain any doubt that they are asleep and resting in their beds and chambers at night, and really are alive. He declares therefore that the righteous dead have not vanished into thin air or been reduced to nothing, but are GATHERED in the assembly of the blessed church, and gathered to their people who departed this life before them in the faith of the promised seed, as when God said to Abraham that after death he would go in peace to his fathers [cf. Gn 15:15] Noah,

¹²⁴ Specker, Vom leiblichen Todt, c3r; the Bible verse in question is Ws 9:15: “For the corruptible body is a load upon the soul, and the earthly habitation presseth down the mind that museth upon many things.” ¹²⁵ Specker, Vom leiblichen Todt, c2r–v. ¹²⁶ Chytraeus, Libellus de morte (VD16 C2652; cited in the 1590 edition, VD16 C2654), 35. For the author (1531–1600), professor of theology and several times rector of the University of Rostock, see NDB 3:254.

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Arphaxad, and the others who died in the Lord before him . . . John says that those who died in the Lord rest from their labors; Isaiah that, weary and afflicted by the labors, cares, and misfortunes of this long life, they are resting in their chambers. And Christ, as if pointing with his finger at this speech of Isaiah, describes the death of the righteous with the appellation SLEEP, which sounds novel and ridiculous in the ears of philosophers and the world, but is most sweet to the righteous; and in this sleep the pious shall pass from the cares, sorrows, sadness, fears, and torments that disturb and plague the whole life of man like so many antechambers, guards, and executioners of death, into tranquil and blessed repose and, enjoying sleep in their sepulchers as if in their beds or bedchambers, they shall await in tranquil peace that most happy day of the resurrection. Thus the other prophets and apostles also call the death of the righteous by the same name. Quos enim mundus mortuos & extinctos nominat: eos Esaias, phrasi ex Mose sumpta, COLLIGI seu CONGREGARI, & VENIRE IN PACEM, & requiescere in cubili suo, atque ita verè viuere affirmat, vt noctu in cubiculis et lectis suis dormientes & requiescentes, vere viuere non dubitamus. Declarat igitur, non euanescere in tenues auras, & in nihilum redigi pios mortuos, sed CONGREGARI in coetum beatae ecclesiae, & colligi ad populum suum, qui ante ipsos fide promissi seminis ex hac vita discesserunt, vt Deus ad Abraham inquit, eum post mortem iturum ad patres suos (Noha, Arphaxad, & caeteros qui ante ipsum in Domino mortui erant) in pace. . . . Iohannes, in Domino mortuos, requiescere à laboribus suis: Esaias, diuturnis vitae huius laboribus, curis & calamitatibus defatigatos & adflictos, requiescere in cubilibus suis ait. & Christus, velut digitum in hanc Esaiae concionem intendens, Mortem piorum, noua & ridicula philosophis ac mundo, sed pijs dulcissima appellatione SOMNI depingit, in quo, à perpetuis vitae huius curis, doloribus, tristicia, metu, angoribus, qui velut πρόδομοι & satellites ac carnifices mortis, totam hominis vitam turbant & excruciant: pij ad quietem tranquillam & beatam perueniunt, & in sepulchris, tanquam lectis aut dormitoriis suis, somno fruentes, laetissimam illam diem resurrectionis, in tranquilla pace expectant. sicut eadem appellatione caeteri etiam Prophetae & Apostoli mortem piorum nominant.¹²⁷

That these divine or divinely inspired appellations are metaphors is spelled out in Chytraeus’s explanation of the use of the Greek aorist infinitive analusai “to unloose, set free, dissolve” in Philippians 1:23: “But I am straitened between two, having a desire to be dissolved and to be with Christ, a thing by far the better”: ¹²⁷ Chytraeus, Libellus de morte, 36, 38; the verse references in parenthesis are in the margin of Chytraeus’ text; cf. also Rv 14:13. The locution that the Douay-Rheims Vulgate translates as “gathered to his people” varies within as well as between different texts of the Vulgate Old Testament: congregates / collectus / adpositus ad populum suum.

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Ἀναλῦσαι signifies not merely the dissolution of the human body’s mass, which is composed and coagulated from the four elements, nor does it merely signify the separation of the soul from the body and its unloosing from its chains, as oxen tied to the yoke all day or prisoners in a dungeon are unloosed from their shackles. It truly also signifies the departure or EMIGRATION from our present lodginghouse or tavern . . . Paul therefore desires to be unloosed from the miserable yoke of this life’s labors and hardships and from the foul dungeon of sin and death, and to emigrate from the ruinous tavern of mortal life to the company of Christ his savior in the house of heaven; thus he uses the same metaphor in respect of travelers and those who change their lodging-house and abode in 2 Corinthians 5 [verse 1: “For we know, if our earthly house of this habitation be dissolved, that we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in heaven”]. Significat enim ἀναλῦσαι, non tantum dissolutionem massae corporis humani ex quattuor elementis compositae & coagulatae: nec tantum separationem Animae à corpore: & solutionem ex vinculis, vt boues toto die iugo alligati, vel in carcere vincti compedibus soluuntur: verùm etiam discessum seu EMIGRATIONEM ex praesenti hospitio aut diuersorio . . . Cupit igitur à tristi iugo laborum & aerumnarum huius vitae, & tetro carcere peccati & mortis solui Paulus, & ex hoc ruinoso vitae mortalis diuersorio, ad Christi seruatoris sui consuetudinem in coelestem domum immigrare, sicut eadem metaphora ab iter facientibus & hospitium ac domicilium mutantibus 2. Cor. 5 vtitur.¹²⁸

The explanation might end at this point, but it continues with a string of further metaphors derived from the usage of the Bible—“emigrate from the lodging-house of the body” (emigrare ex hospitio corporis; cf. Ps (51:7) 52:5); “laying away the tabernacle” (depositio tabernaculi; cf. 2 Pt 1:14); “gain” (lucrum; cf. Phil 1:21); “rest” (requiescere); “sleep” (somnus; dormire); “be sown as seed on the earth, or God’s acre” (seminari in terram, seu Dei agrum; cf. 1 Cor 15:36–44)—before concluding with an exhortation to reflect on and ponder “these most sweet appellations, which are full of efficacious consolation” (has dulcissimas & consolationis efficacis plenas appellationes) and pray to have the Holy Spirit write them in one’s heart.¹²⁹ Franck and Jenisch also frequently invoke comparisons and likenesses when explaining the Bible’s habit of referring to death as sleep. It is therefore all the more striking whenever they shift from an analogist position to a literalist one, and suggest that death actually is a kind of sleep, as if the copula in the statement “death is sleep” were not an elliptical “is like,” and the predicate were not a metaphor or condensed simile, but a literal predication. Franck conducts his exposition of 1 Corinthians 15:51 (“Behold, I show you a mystery: we shall not

¹²⁸ Chytraeus, Libellus de morte, 36–7.

¹²⁹ Ibid., 39–40.

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all sleep”) on analogist ground. The Holy Spirit, “who gives to that which the world calls ‘dying’ the name of ‘sleeping’ ” (der heist (was die welt nennet sterben) ein schlaffen), intends thereby to explain “as in a familiar similitude” (als in ein bekanten gleichnis) that the death of Christians is not really death, but life, and in this way to present death as the friend of the faithful: “just as” (wie) sleep brings recovery and refreshment to the sick and weary, who awake to new vigor without knowing how long they have been sleeping, “so” (also) death offers a welcome respite from the travails of earthly existence to Christians, who will awake to glory without knowing how they fell asleep or for how long.¹³⁰ When however Franck proceeds to explain the nature of the sleep of the dead, he invokes Luther’s epistemological analogy—humans should not reasonably expect to know more about the sleep of the dead than they may know about their own nightly sleeping¹³¹—only to abandon it. Referring to Daniel 12:2 (“And many of those that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake: some unto life everlasting, and others unto reproach, to see it always”), Franck argues that although it is indeed not possible to have complete knowledge of the sleep of the dead, it does not follow that it is impossible to know at least something; indeed, the salient facts may be ascertained from the Bible, which informs us not only that the souls of all the dead, righteous as well as unrighteous, are asleep (this is the informational content of Dn 12:2), but also that the unrighteous experience a different quality of sleep: theirs is rough and brings no ease (Franck’s proof-text is Isaiah 66:24: “their worm shall not die”), whereas the slumber of the righteous is gentle and refreshing, as David testifies in Psalm 4:8: “I will both lay me down and sleep, in peace: for thou, Lord, only makest me dwell in safety.”¹³² In these elucidations, “sleep” is not a similitude or metaphor for a state of the soul that is outside conscious experience, but a literal appellation; although the sleep of the dead may not be fully within the reach of human understanding, there should be no doubt that it really is sleep. The contention that the dead are sleeping is developed by Paul Jenisch into the instrument of a cognitive enlightenment which comes about when the believer accepts the usage as a literal description of the way things are. “Sleep” figures prominently among the numerous names for death and the bodies of the dead that Jenisch discusses in his chapter “On Death,” not only on account of its frequent recurrence, but also and especially because it alone of all these names vacillates between analogy and literal designation. Whereas one set of appellations derived from the cycle of the seasons is said to offer an analogical “image and schema” ¹³⁰ Franck, Trost, K[8]r–L1r. The verse 1 Cor 15:51 is cited in the English of the Authorized Version, which corresponds to Luther’s translation; the Vulgate text and Douay-Rheims do not mention sleep: “omnes quidem resurgemus” (“we shall all indeed rise again”). ¹³¹ See note 121 to this chapter. ¹³² Franck, Trost, L2r–3r; the Psalm verse is closer to the German in the English of the Authorized Version. The notion that the unrighteous dead experience a different kind of sleep from the righteous is put forward by Luther in the context of early discussions of purgatory; see for example his letter to Nikolaus von Amsdorff, January 13, 1522, WA Br 2: 422–3.

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(Bilde vnd Abriß) of what death is like,¹³³ and another from the realm of travel is presented as though the names were literal predications of death,¹³⁴ “sleep” participates in both statuses. On the one hand, and from the perspective of human knowledge and language, it is a likeness of death: “just as” (Gleich wie) the weary welcome sleep more than anything else, “so likewise” (Also) there is nothing more agreeable or desirable than death for those who are racked by terminal illness; once dead, the body is laid in the earth “as” (als) in a mother’s lap to sleep.¹³⁵ On the other hand, from God’s point of view “sleep” is the name for death as it really is. Echoing Luther’s comment about Christ needing only to utter the word “arise” for the dead to revive instantly, Jenisch explains how God is able to restore the dead to life with less effort than it takes for one human to wake another, “because in his sight our death is indeed nothing other than a light sleep.”¹³⁶ And like Luther, Jenisch insists on the communicability of the version of reality encoded in divine language: Christ and the Holy Spirit call death and the grave by the names “sleep” and “bedchamber” so as to reassure believers that death is really life and that when they depart, they do not really die; moreover, because the prophets and apostles talk about death in terms of sleep and repose, it is not only possible but (as we have seen) imperative for a faithful Christian to “reform or correct or improve his tongue” by replacing the improper human appellations with the divinely sanctioned ones.¹³⁷ To adopt the new reformed language and call death “sleep” is to acknowledge its reality and, in so doing, divest it of its horror. Elsewhere in the chapter “On Death,” Jenisch describes this process of language reform, which is simultaneously cognitive and consolatory, through the metaphor of unmasking: Death presents itself as a most ferocious thing, to be sure, and is highly repugnant to our nature. Yet if we tear off its hideous mask through God’s Word, an utterly sweet and lovely image beneath will be disclosed, such that we shall come to desire death ever more fervently, shall no longer be inimical to it or flee from it,

¹³³ Jenisch, Seelenschatz, 450–2, 457–8: death “is like” (ist wie) winter, in that neither the condition nor the season endures and each is succeeded by another, new and more hospitable state; the Bible’s analogies of the seed rotting in the earth (Jn 12:24; 1 Cor 15:36–44) and the dry bones which God will cause to “flourish like an herb” (Is 66:14) are respectively an “image” (Bilde) and an “image and schema” (Bilde vnd Abriß) of the resurrection of the body, which will rise from the ashes “just like” (also) the phoenix does, and awake on the Last Day “just like” (also) nature’s soil, plants and animals, which stir to new life in the spring after lying dead or dormant in the winter. ¹³⁴ Jenisch, Seelenschatz, 434–5, 467, 468: death is variously the “weighing of life’s anchor” (den Ancker vnsers Lebens abloͤsen), “landfall” (anlenden), “homecoming” (heimkommen), “arrival in the port of joy and glory” (in den Porten der Freuden vnd Herrligkeit kommen); the “welcome carter” (angenemer Fuͤhrmann), who conveys his passengers home; the “entrance” (eingang) to eternal life. ¹³⁵ Ibid., 448–9. ¹³⁶ Ibid., 452: “Denn vor jhme vnser Todt / auch anderst nichts ist / als ein leyser Schlaff.” For Luther, see note 122 to this chapter. ¹³⁷ Jenisch, Seelenschatz, 448, 472–3; see also above, 241.

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but shall instead fall into its ranks confidently when the time comes, and even desire to make its acquaintance before then. Es stellet sich der Todt zwar gantz grimmig / vnnd ist vnserer Natur sehr zuwider. Wenn wir jme aber seine haͤßliche Laruen / durch GOttes Wort werden hinweg reyssen: so wirdt sich ein so holdselig / lieblich Bild drunter erzeigen: das wir je lenger je mehr Begirde zu jme bekommen: jhn nicht mehr anfeinden noch fliehen: Sondern wenn es zeit ist / getrost zu jhme tretten / auch wol daruor begeren / mit jhme kundschafft zumachen.¹³⁸

The process is rendered unusually complicated because it involves not one unmasking, but two. To the mask that death, the object of unmasking, wears in order to conceal and falsify its true nature there corresponds a second fallacious covering, which is located on the face of the unmasking subject. This second mask’s deception is however not directed at the world outside—as if the wearer were trying to dupe others round about—but turned inward, on to the wearer herself, whose vision is obstructed so as to give a false impression of reality. If the subject is to see clearly, this covering must also be torn aside; yet the agent of the unmasking is not the perceiving subject whose sight is impaired, but the very object that this masked subject is seeking to unmask: We have the sense of sight but see only through mirrors which blind us; we have eyes, but covered over with a thick opaque membrane; we believe we are seeing, but it occurs only as in a dream. All of which means that what we see is mere lies; all our substance and understanding are mere instability and deception; death alone can restore life and sight to us. Wir haben das Gesicht vnd schawen / aber nur durch Spiegel / die vns blenden: Wir haben Augen / aber mit einem dicken finsteren Fell vberzogen: Wir vermeynen / das wir etwas sehen / aber es geschicht nur wie im Traum: Welche machen / das wir eytel Luͤgenen sehen: Vnser aller Haab vnnd Verstand / ist eytel Leichtfertigkeit vnd Betrug: Allein der Todt / kan vns das Leben / vnd das Gesicht wider geben.¹³⁹

The nexus of metaphor and personification in this passage makes it clear that removing the membrane and tearing aside the mask are not simply alternative

¹³⁸ Jenisch, Seelenschatz, 433–4. ¹³⁹ Ibid, 470. The word Fell, “membrane,” is already attested in MHG as a generic designation for various opacities and growths in the eye such as cataract, glaucoma, leucoma, pterygium, and was still current in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; see Lexer, Mittelhochdeutsches Handwörterbuch, s.v. “vël”; Adelung, Grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch, s.v. “Fêll”; Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, s.v. “Fell.” Luther translates albugo in oculo in Lv 21:20 (Douay-Rheims: “pearl [i.e. cataract or leucoma] in the eye”) as “ein Fell auf dem Auge.”

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metaphors, each expressing from a different perspective, that of the cognizing subject and the cognized object respectively, the same process of enlightenment. They are certainly such metaphors, but the fact that it is a personified death that restores sight to the perceiving subject suggests something else: that the unmasking and the unblinding are reciprocal operations in a single process whereby subject and object are mutually transformed and at the same time mutually transforming. Death is transformed from terrifying enemy to appealing friend through the removal of its mask by a subject whose cognitive state is transformed from blindness to insight through the removal of the membrane on its eyes by a now friendly and beneficent death. And all of this happens, Jenisch insists, “through God’s Word,” through the acceptance into human language of its appellation “sleep” and the acknowledgment of that appellation as the literal name for death’s reality. With Martin Moller, there is no suggestion that “sleep” or indeed any of the other biblical idioms for death, dying, and the grave are anything but literal appellations. They are, as the citations at the opening of this section make clear, names for the constitutive facts of the changed state of affairs that was created by Christ’s sacrifice on the cross: the facts of the kairos, when salvation is at hand, and death and the grave have been “changed” (verwandelt) into a gentle falling asleep and a soft bed to lie on.¹⁴⁰ Rhetorically speaking, they are “proper” appellations. Quintilian defines proprietas as “calling things by their right names,” and Cicero, in a definition with an obvious bearing on Moller’s contention that the new names assumed validity as a consequence of God’s having changed the terms of human existence, states that “proper words” (verba propria) are those that “were almost born at the same time as the things themselves.”¹⁴¹ It is entirely consistent with such an understanding of the relation between words and things when Moller insists that learning the new language is not simply a matter of acquiring a new vocabulary, but also and fundamentally one of acknowledging the new reality; in a prayer to the Holy Spirit for assistance with the language lessons, Moller has his readers say: Teach me your saving and consoling evangelical language; grant that I should not merely hear it with my ears and repeat it with my mouth, but also help me so that I may believe and feel in my heart that, when my last hour comes, I shall not die,

¹⁴⁰ Moller, Manuale, 95v–96v; the passages are cited above, 237–8, 239–40. ¹⁴¹ Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 8.2.1, trans. Butler, 3:196–7: “proprietas . . . est sua cuiusque rei appellatio”; Cicero, De oratore 3.37.149, trans. Sutton and Rackham, 2:118–19: “Ergo utimur verbis . . . quae propria sunt et certa quasi vocabula rerum paene una nata cum rebus ipsis.” Cf. also Rhetorica ad Herennium 4.12.17, trans. Caplan, 270–1: “propria, quae eius rei verba sunt aut esse possunt qua de loquemur.” (Proper terms are such as are, or can be, the designations specially characteristic of the subject of our discourse.) The context for these definitions is a discussion of clarity (perspicuitas, explanatio) in style, and of linguistic propriety as a means for achieving it.

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but fall asleep gently, shall not be laid in my grave, but in my chamber, shall not rot, but rest and repose until you wake me again. Lehre mich deine heylsame vnd trostreiche Evangelische Sprache / Gib das ichs nicht alleine mit den Ohren hoͤre / vnd mit meinem Munde nachspreche / Sondern hilff auch / das ich von Hertzen gleube vnd empfinde / Das ich / wenn mein stuͤndlein da ist / nicht sterbe / sondern sanffte einschlaffe: Nicht ins Grab / sondern in mein Kaͤmmerlein geleget werde / Nicht verwese / sondern ruhe vnd raste / biß du mich wider aufferwecken wirst.¹⁴²

The propriety of appellations is common ground that Moller’s Manuale shares with the “Treatise on Virtues” in the Somme le Roi, and it is therefore fitting as well as revealing for our discussion to conclude with a comparison of the two writings, the one so influential for the vernacular remembrance of the last end during the Middle Ages, and the other destined to dominate Lutheran discourse and devotion around the last things until well into the eighteenth century. In both works, the resources of language are exploited in order to imagine a life and a world other than the ones humans ordinarily know and inhabit: the resources of metaphor in the case of the “Treatise,” which encourages the meditator to “go out of this world in thought and desire” by traversing an imagined landscape of streams, walls, and gateways;¹⁴³ the horizon-words of biblical language in the case of the Manuale, which posit a hereafter into which the sleeper will awake. In both works, this linguistically stimulated meditation on the last things has the effect of challenging the claim of ordinary literal language to “call things by their right names.” The challenge however takes different forms. In the “Treatise,” the propriety of everyday literal appellations such as “life,” “death,” and “end,” “joy,” “riches,” and “honor” is negated: anyone who has contemplated earthly existence from the perspective of eternity, says the author of the “Treatise,” will immediately know that what the world commonly calls by these names is more properly designated by their opposite terms “death,” “life,” and “beginning,” “torment,” “dung,” and “ignominy.” What is normally considered to be literal appellation becomes trope—in this instance, the trope of antiphrasis—and what is normally considered trope becomes the literal appellation that “calls things by their names.”¹⁴⁴ The important thing to note about this inversion is that it is not the categories of proper and improper appellation that are interchanged, but their membership. With Moller, what are commonly considered literal appellations are also replaced by tropes, but the relationship between the two classes of names is different. The names that the Holy Spirit has for death, the grave, and decay—“sleep,” “bed,” “chamber,” “rest,” “hiding until the indignation pass away”—are examples of the

¹⁴² Moller, Manuale, 97r–v. ¹⁴³ See section 2 of Chapter 2, esp. 81–3. ¹⁴⁴ See section 6 of Chapter 2, esp. 106–8.

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trope of euphemism, a special kind of litotes or understatement that is defined in rhetoric as the subtitution of an improper but auspicious word for a proper but inauspicious one.¹⁴⁵ Yet Moller does not describe the relationship between the two sets of names as substitution or interchange; he writes that the Holy Spirit, in recognition of Christ’s salvific mediation, “suspends” (hebet . . . auff) the “hateful names” (heßliche Namen) “death,” etc. and chooses to console believers with new, biblical ones.¹⁴⁶ The verb that Moller uses, aufheben, means “to suspend” both in the primary sense of “raise, lift” and in the extended sense of “to hold in abeyance” or “annul”; Luther uses it to translate numerous verbs and verb phrases of the Vulgate Bible that refer to God’s putting an end to or annulling something: cessare facere “make to cease” (the remembrance of those who abandon his worship; Dt 32:26); auferre “take away” (the reproach of his people; Is 25: 8); irritum facere “make void,” “disannul” (his covenant; Zec 11:10; Gal 3:17).¹⁴⁷ As suspended appellations, “death,” “grave,” and “decay” are no longer the proper way to call things as they really are, but nor have they switched into the category of improper tropes. Held in abeyance, they no longer occupy any functional place in the system of linguistic signs such that they might be assigned to either the category of the proper or the improper. As “hateful names” whose application has been suspended, they belong rather to the grammatically and rhetorically unexampled class of dead literalisms, brought to cessation and superseded by the new living literalism of the divine Word.

¹⁴⁵ Lausberg, Handbuch, section 587. ¹⁴⁶ Moller, Manuale, 96r–v, cited above, 237–8. ¹⁴⁷ The English translations are from Douay-Rheims which, as may be seen, imitates the variety of the Latin Vulgate.

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Conclusion Last Things and First Philosophy

“I would not urge anyone to read this book except those who are able and willing to meditate seriously with me, and to withdraw their minds from the senses and from all preconceived opinions.” Thus René Descartes addressed the reader of his Meditations on First Philosophy (Meditationes de prima philosophia) first published in 1641.¹ It is a sequence of metaphysical reflections in which a thinker, who speaks in the first person and whose “I” is consequently a position for Descartes’ reader to occupy, accustoms herself to dismissing all images and thoughts derived from the perceptions of her senses so as to concentrate exclusively on what the mind perceives instead. The strategy, applied over six consecutive days in a state of unencumbered solitude, involves the mental rehearsal of a methodical doubt in order to overcome a prior epistemological doubt. Despairing initially of the possibility of knowing anything for certain because the evidence of the senses is so unreliable, the thinker discovers that by suspending judgment on everything she previously took for granted, her mind is free, for the duration of the meditations at least, from the risk of error, and able to direct its attention inward, onto its own activity of reflection. In so doing, the thinker finds herself obliged to acknowledge one truth as certain: that even if the existence of everything else may be doubted, there is no doubt that “I” exist as the mind that does the doubting. On the basis of this truth further arguments are developed, which (so Descartes believed) lay solid foundations on which human minds may build up scientific knowledge in the conviction that certainty is achievable: that I have a clear and distinct idea of God as an infinitely perfect being, and that this idea would be impossible unless such a being existed; that God, being perfect, does not deceive me when I perceive things clearly and distinctly; that if ever I am deceived in my opinions, the fault lies within me, because I will have exercised my judgment beyond what is warranted by my understanding; that the mind is distinct from the body; that the material world outside the mind is real.² Collectively these arguments constitute “all the first things to be discovered by philosophizing,” and that,

¹ Descartes, Meditationes, preface, AT 7:9; Meditations, trans. Cottingham, Writings 2:8. ² Descartes summarized the arguments of the Meditations in the “Synopsis” he wrote to accompany them: AT 7:12–16; trans. Cottingham, 2:9–11. Meditating Death in Medieval and Early Modern Devotional Writing: From Bonaventure to Luther. Mark Chinca, Oxford University Press (2020). © Mark Chinca. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198861980.001.0001

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Descartes explained, is why he thought the term “first philosophy” belonged in the title of the work that described the course of his meditations.³ Modern commentary on Descartes’ choice of title has been more interested in its first component. The word “meditation” was not in common use as a designation for works of philosophy at the time; because of this, it has been assumed that Descartes meant to advertise a connection between his Meditations and Christian devotional exercises.⁴ The precise nature of the connection however has proved difficult to define and occasioned a good deal of disagreement among scholars. The discussion has two main strands: a historico-genetic strand, which is concerned to identify sources that may have been familiar to Descartes so as to locate him more accurately in a field of relations of influence; and a philosophical strand, which poses the question whether the devotional connection, if there is any, alters the way in which readers should understand and evaluate the Meditations as philosophy. So far as the identification of possible sources is concerned, there is a debate about whether a particular handbook of religious meditation was the model for the Meditations—Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises have long been the prime candidate, because of Descartes’ Jesuit education—or whether Descartes’ debt was to the genre of meditational exercises in general.⁵ Even more contentious is the question whether it makes any difference to the status of Descartes’ ideas as philosophy that he chose to present them as meditations. One point of view argues that his deliberate invocation of spiritual exercise is rhetorical strategy, designed to convince traditionally minded readers of his religious orthodoxy.⁶ Another asserts that the meditational form is integral to the philosophy, either because it produces the necessary frame of mind for readers to arrive at an intellectual intuition of the arguments,⁷ or because the ³ Descartes, letter to Marin Mersenne, November 11, 1640, AT 3:235; trans. Cottingham, Writings 3:157: “I have not put any title on it, but it seems to me that the most suitable would be René Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, because I do not confine my discussion to God and the soul, but deal in general with all the first things to be discovered by philosophizing.” ⁴ Rubidge, “Descartes’s Meditations,” 44. ⁵ An influence of Ignatius Loyola on Descartes’ Meditations has been considered since the 1950s. See Mesnard, “L’Arbre de la sagesse”; Beck, Metaphysics of Descartes, 28–38; Stohrer, “Descartes and Ignatius Loyola”; Vendler, “Descartes’ Exercises.” Descartes attended the Jesuit college of La Flèche between 1606 and 1614; one of the teachers there during this time, François Véron, wrote a version of the Spiritual Exercises for the use of students: the Manuale Sodalitatis, first edition 1608. Pupils at La Flèche performed the exercises each year during the week before Easter, though it is not certain that Descartes participated, since he was often excused from strenuous activities on account of his delicate health. See Thomson, “Loyola et Descartes,” 62 n. 7. Catholic writers of the Counter-Reformation from traditions and organizations other than the Jesuits have also been proposed as possible models for the Meditations: the Oratorian Eustachius a Sancto Paulo (Hatfield, “Senses”); the Minim friar (and friend and correspondent of Descartes) Marin Mersenne (Hettche, “Descartes and the Augustinian Tradition”). The view that Descartes’ debt was to the meditational genre as a whole, rather than to any particular author or work, has been expressed most forcefully by Rorty, “Structure.” ⁶ Rubidge, “Descartes’s Meditations,” 48. ⁷ Hatfield, “Senses”; Hettche, “Descartes,” 306–10, who argues that this meditatively induced intuition however does not extend to all the arguments of the Meditations, but is restricted to the thinker’s intuition of the cogito. By contrast Sepper, “Texture of Thought,” thinks that all of the

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philosophy itself aims at a transformation of the individual’s cognitive habitus through the strenuous exercise of introspective reason.⁸ A stronger version of the last interpretation posits that the Meditations demand of their readers a once-in-alifetime decision to apply their judgment correctly which is exactly analogous to the election made by the Ignatian exercitant to align his way of life and his being with God’s purpose.⁹ Uniting all the different and sometimes quite stridently opposed voices in the debate is a common desire to specify the constructive role of Christian devotional meditation: what contribution did it make to the formulation of Descartes’ exercises in philosophical meditation, and what part did it play in forming his conception of the purpose of philosophy?¹⁰ The concentration on construction has obscured the possibility that Descartes may also have been aiming at the deconstruction of a traditional understanding of meditation. The understanding in question is the one which will by now be wholly familiar to readers of this book: the Platonic-Socratic conception of philosophy as the “meditation of death” as it was adopted by Christian asceticism. In the Phaedo, Plato insisted that the mind cannot know any stable truths via the senses, because their evidence is in flux and confusing; instead, the mind must withdraw itself from the bodily senses and from the world they mediate so as to be free to contemplate the ideal and unchanging forms which constitute the paradigmatic structure of true reality. The withdrawal of the mind to be “alone by itself,” Plato declared through the mouthpiece of his friend and hero Socrates, is the right way to do philosophy, and to this nonempirical, disembodied mode of cognition Socrates gives the name meletē thanatou, the meditation—in the sense of “practice” or “rehearsal”—of death, because the required separation of the mind from the bodily senses and all the images and thoughts derived from them is an anticipatory analogy of the soul’s release from the body in physical death.¹¹ The name meletē thanatou lived on in Latin Christendom in the saying, usually attributed to Socrates or Plato, that philosophia est meditatio mortis, “philosophy is the meditation of death,” and it became the topos of a religious discourse which defined the ascetic routines of the monastic community, turned away from the blandishments of the material world and directed toward the expectation of the next, suprasensible one, as the fulfillment

Meditations are meditational in the sense that they immerse the reader in an imaginatively constructed experience of the arguments. ⁸ Rorty, “Structure,” 3, 10–18. ⁹ Vendler, “Descartes’ Exercises.” Cf. Ignatius Loyola, Exercitia spiritualia, sections 169–89, ed. Calveras and Dalmases, 262–78; Spiritual Exercises, trans. Ganss, 74–80. ¹⁰ These questions are of course susceptible of being answered in the negative; the most prominent example is Bradley Rubidge, who argued that, apart from serving the rhetorical function of advertising the author’s religious orthodoxy, the allusions to Christian devotional practices in the Meditations do not impinge on their philosophical content and purpose (Rubidge, “Descartes’s Meditations,” 44–9). ¹¹ Plato, Phaedo 64a–69d, 81a, ed. Rowe, 31–9, 56; trans. Gallop, 9–16, 32–3.

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of the philosophic life.¹² With this monastic appropriation of the name commenced an association of philosophy, ascetic reflection, and Christian remembrance of the last end which was still so present to early modern minds that Protestant writers of the later sixteenth century went out of their way to affirm or deny it.¹³ Such contestations are the paroxysms of a theology defining its limits in an epoch when religious confessionalization was forcing the issue of where the boundaries of creed and doctrine lie. The transition to early modernity also witnessed a loosening of the nexus of philosophy, meditation, and the last things from the side of philosophy; this happened whenever philosophical reflection, reconnecting with Stoic and Epicurean positions, chose to treat death as a natural event. Francis Bacon, in his essay “Of Death” (1610/1625), conceded that “the Contemplation of Death, as the wages of sin, and Passage to another world, is Holy and Religious,” but added that “the Feare of it, as a Tribute due unto Nature, is weake,” in other words, is not rational. In support of the latter claim Bacon referred his readers to Seneca who, speaking “onely as a Philosopher, and Naturall Man,” that is, not as a Christian, encouraged us to see that it is not death that terrifies so much as the pompa—the panoply of torments, ceremonies, and customs—that surrounds it.¹⁴ Arguments about the irrationality of fearing death are put into the mouth of Nature herself in Montaigne’s slightly earlier essay “That to philosophize is to learn to die” (“Que Philosopher, c’est apprendre à mourir”) (1580/1595). The essay is a series of reflections on death in which Montaigne plays off the Socratic definition of philosophy as meletē thanatou against the Epicurean maxim that “pleasure is our goal” (le plaisir est nostre but). Beginning from the proposition that “to philosophize is nothing else but to prepare for death” (philosopher ce n’est autre chose que s’aprester à la mort), and explaining that philosophizing therefore means either “a sort of apprenticeship and semblance of death” (quelque aprentissage et ressemblance de la mort) or the resolution of “all the wisdom and reasoning of the world . . . to this point: to teach us not to be afraid to die” (toute la sagesse et discours du monde . . . à ce point, de nous apprendre à ne craindre point à mourir), Montaigne meditates on death in order to find the perspective from which he might learn to treat it as an object of unconcern, one that will not give rise to thoughts that perturb his tranquillity.¹⁵ Such a perspective

¹² See Chapter 1, 38–43. ¹³ See the sources cited in note 22 of Chapter 5. ¹⁴ Bacon, Essayes 2, ed. Kiernan, 9 (1625 text; the earliest version of this essay is 1610/1612). Bacon expands the scope of pompa, by which Seneca means the appurtenances of a violent death, to include all the rituals of mourning and funerals; cf. Seneca, Epistles 24.14, trans. Gummere, 1:172–3. ¹⁵ Montaigne, Essais 1.19, ed. Balsamo et al., 84–5 (1595 text); Essays 1.20, trans. Frame, 56. The definition is attributed by Montaigne to Cicero, who attributed it in his turn to Socrates; cf. Tusculan Disputations 1.30.74, trans. King, 86–7: “Tota enim philosophorum vita, ut ait idem [Socrates], commentatio mortis est” (For the whole life of the philosopher, as the same wise man says, is a preparation for death). The noun commentatio, “thinking out, preparation,” overlaps in meaning with meditatio; cf. Oxford Latin Dictionary, s.v.

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is supplied by “the good counsels of our mother Nature” (les bons advertissements de nostre mere Nature), who delivers her teachings in a long prosopopoeia which is modeled on Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things and correspondingly replete with Epicurean topoi. Death is part of the equitable order and balance of nature; a person who has enjoyed a fulfilled life has no reason to complain when the time comes to die, whereas the one who has not would be irrational to wish for the prolongation of a fruitless existence; an immortal life would be intolerable because there would be no end to suffering; there is no reason why death should worry the living, because so long as they are alive, their death is not; nor should or indeed can it concern the dead, because they no longer feel anything.¹⁶ Descartes’ Meditations are part of the same historical front as the essays by Montaigne and Bacon, inasmuch as they too disentangle the Socratic conception of philosophizing from its centuries-long involvement with theology. Unlike Montaigne and Bacon, however, they do not accomplish this by refocusing philosophical reflection on death as a fact of nature: neither death nor any of the other last things is among the topics considered by the Cartesian meditator. Rather, Descartes focuses on the work of meditation itself and endows it with a new function. It was Hans Blumenberg who remarked of the Meditations that they “tend toward the practicing [Einübung] of an attitude that becomes habit: the attitude of the obfirmata mens [steadfast mind], of not being able to forget that the human mind is endangered by its labile inclination to judgment and prejudgment.”¹⁷ Blumenberg’s choice of the word Einübung, “practice” with a view to making a secure acquisition of the disposition or aptitude being practiced, was surely deliberate; through it he acknowledges Descartes’ understanding of philosophy as meditation, in the meaning that the word meletē had for Plato’s Socrates: the methodical practice or rehearsal of an attitude of mind. The attitude that Descartes’ meditator rehearses to the point where it becomes habitual is that of resolutely withholding assent from the evidence of her senses so as to avoid the possibility of being misled into error. The resolve to make a practice of this withdrawal is articulated at the conclusion of the first meditation: “I shall stubbornly and firmly persist in this meditation; and, even if it is not in my power to know any truth, I shall at least do what is in my power, that is, resolutely [obfirmata mente, literally “with a resolute mind”] guard against assenting to any falsehoods, so that the deceiver, however powerful and cunning he may be,

¹⁶ Montaigne, Essais 1.19, ed. Balsamo et al., 94–8; Essays 1.20, trans. Frame, 64–7. Cf. Lucretius, De rerum natura bk. 3, lines 830–1094, trans. Rouse, 252–75, which also contains a speech by Nature (lines 931–62, trans. Rouse, 260–5). For Epicurus on death, see Warren, Facing Death. ¹⁷ Blumenberg, Legitimität der Neuzeit, 207: “Die Meditationen des Descartes . . . tendieren auf die Einübung einer habituell werdenden Einstellung der obfirmata mens, des Nicht-vergessen-Könnens der Gefährdungen des menschlichen Geistes durch die Labilität zum Urteil und Vorurteil hin.” My translation, which is more literal than Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Wallace, 183.

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will be unable to impose on me in the slightest degree.”¹⁸ It is by sustaining the practice, by rehearsing the attitude to the point where it becomes a habit, that the meditator will succeed in shaking every actual and potential delusion from her mind so as to be free to discover there the truths of “first philosophy” which are immune to doubt. Death and the other last things do not feature among those truths, but they do get a significant mention in the dedicatory letter that Descartes addressed to the Sorbonne theology faculty in the hope of gaining their approval for his philosophy. In this letter, which was prefixed to the text of the Meditations, Descartes suggests that theologians should welcome his book because its philosophical exercises provide a rational foundation for Christian religion and morality capable of persuading those who do not already believe. “For us who are believers, it is enough to accept on faith that the human soul does not die with the body, and that God exists; but in the case of unbelievers, it seems that there is no religion, and practically no moral virtue, that they can be persuaded to adopt until these two truths are proved to them by natural reason. And since in this life the rewards offered to vice are often greater than the rewards of virtue, few people would prefer what is right to what is expedient if they did not fear God or have the expectation of an after-life.”¹⁹ The last things—more specifically the certainty that every individual person faces either everlasting punishment in hell or eternal reward in heaven—are invoked here in their traditional function as the proper horizon in which to make moral choices. For if, Descartes reasons, we were to make our choices in accordance with the conclusions we draw from observing the pattern of earthly reward and punishment, we should always tend to prefer vice over virtue; the only way to resist this tendency and install a preference for virtue is to remember that we shall all be subject to a divine tribunal whose distribution of punishment and reward is infinitely more severe, infinitely more just, and infinitely more enduring than the dispensations of earthly fortune or justice. The argument is thus, at bottom, a restatement of Sirach 7:40: “In all thy works remember thy last end, and thou shalt never sin.” The willingness of individuals to evaluate and regulate their conduct in the expectation of the last end presupposes, however, belief in a transcendent agency of justice, as well as in the continued survival of the person to be subject to that justice. That is what unbelievers refuse to accept and what Descartes claims his Meditations will prove beyond rational doubt. The problem is that what the Meditations have to say about God and the soul is insufficient to found belief in the last things. This is for two reasons. The first is ¹⁸ Descartes, Meditationes 1, AT 7:23; trans. Cottingham, Writings 2:15. The resolution follows directly upon the meditator’s decision to engage in a thought-experiment which posits that everything she has accepted as truth up till now might be an enormous falsehood induced by “some malicious demon of the utmost power and cunning [who] has employed all his energies in order to deceive me.” ¹⁹ Descartes, Meditationes, dedicatory letter, AT 7:1–2; trans. Cottingham, Writings 2:3.

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that the question Descartes seeks to answer is not theological, but epistemological: how can our knowledge of the world be reliable when we cannot be certain about the purposes of its creator—in other words, when we are obliged to admit that God may have disposed the world in ways quite other than we think we know it to be? “Since I now know,” says Descartes’ meditator upon accepting the finitude of her own judgment, “that my own nature is very weak and limited, whereas the nature of God is immense, incomprehensible and infinite, I also know without more ado that he is capable of countless things whose causes are beyond my knowledge.”²⁰ The proofs of God and the soul (or mind; Descartes regards the words as coterminous)²¹ that are presented in the Meditations are tailored to the solution of the epistemological difficulty; they seek to demonstrate that, in spite of God’s unknowability, there is a metaphysical assurance for the human endeavor of accumulating knowledge about the world.²² The proofs claim to establish beyond all possibility of doubt or contradiction that there exists an absolutely perfect being who, being perfect, cannot want to deceive the human mind of whose existence it is the cause; the proofs are further intended to establish that the mind is a separate substance from the body, and that everything the mind clearly and distinctly perceives must be true since the perception, being clear and distinct, is necessarily of something; this something must have God for its author, and God does not deceive.²³ Yet the God who is a non-deceiving perfect being and the mind defined as a thinking thing independent of the body and capable of forming true beliefs about the world are not—or not yet—the God and the soul of Christian eschatological faith. Descartes himself recognized that his arguments did not go the whole way to providing the promised apologetics for Christian religion when, in the “Synopsis” he wrote to accompany the text of the Meditations, he conceded that he had not given a complete demonstration of the immortality of the soul, but merely pursued the arguments about the mind-body distinction to the point where ²⁰ Descartes, Meditationes 4, AT 7:55; trans. Cottingham, Writings 2:39. ²¹ Cf. ibid., synopsis, AT 7:14; trans. Cottingham, Writings 2:10. Here the French version by LouisCharles d’Albert (which was published with Descartes’ approval in 1647) glosses the statement “the mind [mens] is immortal by its very nature” with the addition “[the mind] or the soul of man, for I make no distinction between them.” ²² Cf. the remarkable contextualization of Descartes’ Meditations in the history of late medieval scholasticism by Blumenberg, Legitimität der Neuzeit, pt. 2, chap. 4, “Die Unentrinnbarkeit eines trügerischen Gottes.” On Blumenberg’s account, Descartes is not so much the thinker who broke with medieval philosophy as the one whose questions continued to be framed by nominalist metaphysics—if we accept that God is not constrained by the laws of nature as we know them, we cannot be certain that our knowledge of the world is complete and true—and sought to establish a metaphysical foundation for human understanding of the physical world in spite of God’s hiddenness from our view. ²³ The proofs of God’s existence are elaborated by Descartes in Meditations 3 and 5; those about the mind as a thinking thing that does not err when it perceives clearly and distinctly in Meditations 2, 4, and 6. The circularity of the arguments—the proof of God presupposes the very reliability of clear and distinct perception that is meant to ground—was already noted by Descartes’ contemporaries and debated in the “Objections and Replies” that accompanied the text of the Meditations from its first edition.

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“they are enough to show that the decay of the body does not imply the destruction of the mind, and are hence enough to give mortals the hope of an after-life.”²⁴ That brings me to the second and more fundamental reason why the Meditations do not ground belief in the last things. It may be that the idea of a God who presides over the last judgment along with the idea of a soul that survives the death of the body are contained in Descartes’ proofs as their implications; and it may also be that Descartes declined to set out these implications simply because, as he indicates in the “Synopsis,” it would have gone beyond his purpose in the Meditations to do so.²⁵ It is certainly possible to try to reason one’s way from the premise of a mind not dependent on a perishable body to the conclusion that the soul is immortal; likewise it is possible to reason that an infinitely perfect God must also be infinitely just—for if God were in so much as the slightest degree unjust, he would not be perfect. Yet even if the implications were fully unpacked and supported by arguments, they would still fall far short of demonstrating the central tenets of Christian eschatology. For to assert that the soul is immortal is to say nothing about how and where that soul will spend its afterlife. Similarly, to prove that God is perfectly just does not automatically commit one to a particular account of how God exercises his justice—for example, to the account that says God will be merciful to wrongdoers who show remorse, but only if the remorse is shown before death. How the tenets of Christian eschatology and soteriology necessarily follow from the proof of God’s existence and the soul’s immortality remains unexplained; indeed these tenets are not susceptible of proof by philosophical reason, because they are truths of revelation and theological dogma. Descartes’ Meditations did not usher in the demise of remembering the last end. Both the practice and the textual resources that sustained it continued to flourish in the confessionalized religious cultures of the seventeenth century. In the territories of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, the influence of Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises spread with the Jesuit order and became normative: in addition to the Exercises themselves, there were adaptations of them for use in Jesuit colleges, sodalities, and confraternities as well as by individual laypeople;²⁶

²⁴ Descartes, Meditationes, synopsis, AT 7:13; trans. Cottingham, Writings 2:10. ²⁵ He remarks that a complete demonstration of the immortality of the soul would require “an account of the whole of physics”; Descartes, Meditationes, synopsis, AT 7:13; trans. Cottingham, Writings 2:10. ²⁶ For the use of the Spiritual Exercises as part of the training of Jesuits in the period between Ignatius Loyola’s death (1556) and the promulgation of the official Directory of Spiritual Exercises (1599), intended to guide their implementation, see Iparraguirre, Historia, 2:257–461. On Véron’s Manuale Sodalitatis, designed for the use of students in Jesuit colleges, see Thomson, “Loyola et Descartes,” 61–9. Another text in widespread use in Jesuit schools and sodalities as well as by private individuals all over Catholic central Europe was the Calendarium novum ad bene moriendum perquam utile, first published in 1665 and reprinted well into the eighteenth century. It includes a cycle of meditational readings, one for each day of the month; the readings for the third through the eighth days cover the last things. On its author Johannes Nadási (1614–1679), see Tüskés, Johannes Nadási, with a list of editions of the Calendarium, 516–18.

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the Ignatian practice of systematically bringing each aspect of the afterlife into mental presence was also disseminated by another prominent Jesuit, Robert Bellarmine, whose De arte bene moriendi (The Art of Dying Well) of 1620 exhorted its readers to meditate on heaven and hell once a day under the headings of place, time, and mode.²⁷ On the other side of the confessional divide, the Lutheran model of “hearing and believing” continued to be productive, engendering mammoth compendia of homiletic expositions of Bible verses relating to death and the last end, for example David von Schweinitz’s Hundert evangelische Todesgedanken (One hundred evangelical thoughts on death) and Johann Jacob Otho’s Evangelischer Krankentrost (Evangelical consolation for the sick).²⁸ All of these works and the meditational practices they support are the continuation of earlier traditions: the Bonaventuran system of methodical exercise in the case of Jesuits, the Lutheran focus on the consolatory maxim in the case of Protestant writers. The difference is that these traditions are perpetuated in a discursive landscape that was completely realigned as a result of the unwinding of the alliance of philosophy, meditation, and remembering the last end which took place in the decades from Montaigne to Descartes. Christian remembrance of the last end henceforth had to maintain itself in a field of alternatives. On the one hand, there was the natural philosophical reflection of a Montaigne or Bacon, whose meditations on death gave fresh valency to ancient ethical ideals of happiness (eudaimonia), unperturbedness (apatheia), and tranquillity (ataraxia). On the other hand, there was the new Cartesian style of meditation: a training in steadfastness of mind so as to grasp the elements of a first philosophy from whose non-deceiving deity no obvious or necessary path leads to the God of the last things. It was this new discursive configuration, characterized by pluralism and the disconnection of philosophy from theology, that would give to early modern remembrance of the last end its distinct epochal signature.

²⁷ Bellarmine, De arte bene moriendi, bk. 2, chaps. 3, 4. A modern English translation of the work is included in Bellarmine, Spiritual Writings, ed. Donnelly and Teske; see Donnelly’s introduction to the volume, 23–4, 33–42, for information about the work and its early modern popularity (translations into English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and other languages); also Vogt, Patience, 30–5. ²⁸ Schweinitz’s Hundert evangelische Todesgedanken (first edition 1664; VD17 3:600272S) was reprinted at least six more times by 1727, and translated into French as Meditations sur la mort (Berlin 1699; VD17 23:666882B). Otho’s Evangelischer Krankentrost (first edition 1665; VD17 23:323766F) went through at least ten further editions to 1774. The statistics are based on the entries in the VD17 and KVK databases.

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Index Note: Page numbers in italic denotes the figures. afterlife, the 3, 41, 71n21, 94, 173n74, 180, 198, 203, 228, 260–1 in “Treatise on Virtues,” 66–8, 72, 98, 102 Agnes of Poitou 30, 30nn54–5 Alcuin 40, 196n138 Alexander of Hales 44 allegory 35n69, 118n32 Benedictine 22 in Bonaventure 34–5, 37, 52 Ambrose 42n93, 77, 231n85 amplification (of text) 30, 162, 169, 175 in Cordiale 190 in Seuse 109, 127, 138, 139, 143 in Smaragdus 25 in “Treatise on Virtues,” 72, 82 in Zerbolt 175–7 anagogical interpretation 24 Anselm 7, 29, 30–1, 185n107, 243 Prayers and Meditations 10, 20, 57–60 “A meditation to stir up fear,” 57, 58 “A lament for virginity unhappily lost,” 57, 59 antiphrasis 108, 212, 251 Apocalypse 3n11, 88n73, 101 apophatic way 147, 148n131 Appleford, Amy 7 apprenticeship 18n16, 23, 24, 30, 134, 256 Aquinas, Thomas 50, 54, 79n46, 133n70, 148n130 Aristotle 7, 19, 44, 191n125 and categorial analysis 54–5 excerpted 187n113, 199 and knowledge by abstraction 50–1, 52 and the senses 134n73, 144 ars aeterna 36–7 ars moriendi (genre) 68, 69n8, 110, 218n38, 229n79 See also Laurent d’Orléans: La Somme le Roi: “Treatise on Virtues” and ars moriendi artisanship 18, 21–3, 31, 35–8, 181–3 asceticism 4, 17, 27, 39, 78, 134, 145, 174n79, 255–6 askēsis 16 aufheben (of ordinary language) 240, 252 Augustine 17, 39n83, 44, 70, 74n30, 128, 144n112, 191n126 and Christ as man and God 118, 133 Confessions 139, 140n98

De civitate Dei (City of God) 39n84, 78, 83n59, 83n61 and divine illumination 49–50 excerpted 138, 165, 176, 185, 187n113 and language 79n48, 106n126 and rapture 101–2, 135n80 and seeing (three ways) 42, 72, 99–102, 124n50, 135, 159 Augustodunensis, Honorius 150 Elucidarium 67 Aurifaber, Johann 232 authority 99, 123, 187, 197–8, 208 Averroes 187n113 Avicenna. See Ibn Sina Bacon, Francis “Of Death,” 256, 257, 261 Baldwin of Ford 128 baptism 123, 209, 223 Barby, Countess Anna of 234 beatific vision 64, 78n43, 118, 136 See also visions belief. See faith; hearing: and believing Bellarmine, Robert De arte bene moriendi (On the art of dying well) 261 Benedict XII Benedictus Deus 71n20, 78n43 Benedictine Rule, the 18, 20–3, 25, 31–5, 38, 70, 182–3 Benedict of Nursia 17 See also Benedictine Rule, the bereavement, Lutheran attitudes to 241n119 Bernard of Clairvaux 7, 17, 70, 74n30, 78n43, 80n50, 107n127, 150 excerpted 94, 168, 185n108, 186n109, 187n113, 203, 236 and meditation 32n61, 61 Bernhard VII, Prince of Anhalt-Zerbst 232, 234 Beust, Joachim von Enchiridion de arte bene moriendi (Handbook of the art of dying well) 213, 227 Bible, the 3 in Bonaventure 34–5, 44, 46, 47, 62 in Devotio Moderna 159, 163, 167–9, 180–1, 187, 190–8

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Bible, the (cont.) in Lutheranism 6, 207–11, 212–13, 216, 226–32, 234–7 and language 234–5, 237–48, 251–2 in monasticism 5, 24–5, 29–30 in Seuse 112, 118–19, 124–9, 134, 138–42, 142–6, 149, 152 in “Treatise on Virtues,” 68, 70, 84–5 bilderîche 124n50 See also images: in Seuse Bildlichkeit 129n65 See also images: in Seuse bildrich vision 124n50 See also images: in Seuse bîschaft 136 See also exemplarity; images: in Seuse Black, Max 81n53 Blanche of France 15 Blarer, Ambrosius 213n22 Blumenberg, Hans 257, 259n22 bodies 68, 75–9, 191–2, 198, 243, 259 See also disembodiment; embodiment Boethius The Consolation of Philosophy 107n127, 125 Bonaventure 4, 17, 71n21, 135–6, 145n116 excerpted 166–7, 168, 171 and influence on later writers 70, 133, 135, 159, 170, 174 and metaphors 18, 31–8, 47, 62 and methodical system 6, 16–18, 31–4, 36–8, 43, 61–5 and philosophical/epistemological basis for meditation 19, 32, 43–9, 50–7 and relationship between text and meditator 20, 57–65 works: Breviloquium 16n4, 47–8, 54 Collationes de decem praeceptis 94n86 Commentary on the Sentences 44n106, 45 De reductione artium ad theologiam (On the Reduction of the Arts to Theology) 45–6 De regimine animae (On Governing the Soul) 15, 16n5 De triplici via (The Threefold Way) 15–16, 18n14, 31–4, 52–7, 167, 170–1, 174 Itinerarium mentis in Deum 16n4, 34–8, 47, 135, 174n78 Soliloquium de quatuor mentalibus exercitiis (Soliloquium on the Four Spiritual Exercises) 15–16, 17, 47n116, 57–65, 94–8, 170 Brenz, Johannes Wie man sich christenlich zu dem Sterben bereiten soll (How one should prepare for death in a Christian manner) 224–5, 230n83 Brinckerink, Johan 159–60

Carl, Prince of Anhalt-Zerbst 235–6 Carruthers, Mary 4, 5, 8, 24n30, 94n85, 94n89 Cassian, John Institutes 41 Cassiodorus 40, 41n90 cataphatic way 147, 148n131 Cato of Utica 73, 75 Caxton, William Book Ryal 91, 92 Charreton, Arnulf 69–70 Christ 2, 6, 27, 40–1, 50, 166, 171, in Bonaventure 33, 36–8, 52–6, 58, 62–3 illustrations of 85, 88n73, 89–90, 130–2 in judgment 67, 89–90, 154 as ladder 36–8, 225 in Lutheranism 209–10, 214–17, 220–9, 235–9, 242, 244, 248, 250, 252 monogram of 132, 151–2 in Saint Paul 77–8 in Seuse 112, 118–19, 120, 122–3, 126, 128–33, 134, 137, 139, 141, 144–53 Christian III of Denmark 235 Chrysostom, John 168, 187n113, 192, 198, 241 Chytraeus, David Libellus de morte et vita aeterna (Little book on death and eternal life) 244–6 Cicero 42, 146n122, 187n113, 250 Cisneros, García de Exercitatorio de la vida espiritual (Book of Exercises for the Spiritual Life) 16, 178n94 cloak of righteousness 214, 216, 237 See also clothing metaphors; words: as winding-sheet clothing metaphors 119, 123, 126, 129–30, 133, 144, 146–8, 215n26 See also cloak of righteousness; words: as winding-sheet Coelius, Michael 231n85, 235n100 cognition 6, 8, 40–1, 43, 49, 161n26, 200, 255 in Bonaventure 37, 45, 47, 51n132 in Jenisch 247–8, 250 in Seuse 100, 118, 134–6, 148n131 in “Treatise on Virtues,” 71–2, 74, 99–100 collations (as practice in Devotio Moderna) 166 commonplace book. See rapiaria compiling 158, 160, 187 See also excerpting; rapiaria compositio loci 178 confessionalization 13, 208, 256, 260 consideratio 32n61 consolatory maxims. See Trostsprüche contemplatio 32n61, 42–3, 48 contemptus mundi (contempt for the world) 61, 76

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 copying (of text) 158, 165, 169, 173, 183 See also rewriting Cordiale, seu quatuor novissima (Cordial, or four last things). See under Gerard van Vliederhoven Counter-Reformation, the 13, 208, 217, 222, 254n5, 260 craft. See artisanship cura monialium 117n28 da’ath 134 Dailey, Patricia 118n31, 141n105 Damian, Peter 29, 30–1, 167 damnation 2, 20, 90, 96, 111, 201, 217, 229, 236 David of Augsburg De exterioris et interioris hominis compositione 174n79 Davidson, Donald 34n67, 81n53 dead parchment 119, 126–8, 132, 142 death, personification of 82–3, 90–3, 102, 249–50 deathbed/time of dying, the 3, 201, 218–19, 224, 229n79, 234–5 De consideratione novissimorum 71n21 Descartes, René Meditations on First Philosophy (Meditationes de prima philosophia) 253–5, 257–60, 261 Devotio Moderna (New Devotion/Devout) 16, 116, 154–5, 157–62, 166, 178n94, 236 de Worde, Wynkyn 91–2, 93 Dietrich, Veit 234n95 Dirc van Delft Tafel van den Kersten Ghelove (Table of the Christian faith) 115 discernment 68, 72n23, 103–4, 107 disembodiment 32, 48, 78n43, 90, 255 See also embodiment; bodies dissolving/dissolution 78, 119–20, 140, 243, 245–6 divine illumination 48 in Aquinas 50 in Augustine 49–50 in Bonaventure 19, 48–9, 50–2 in Loyola 1 in Seuse 123, 126, 128 doctrine 23, 44, 67, 102, 103, 133, 256 domestic space 6, 233, 234 doubt 244, 253, 258–9 dreaming 100, 239 Duns Scotus, John 54 earthly existence 75, 90, 104, 196, 247, 251 earth to earth statements 189–95, 198 ecstasy 35, 37, 47, 100–1, 118, 135, 159 Einübung (practice) 257

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ekphrasis 93–4, 94n89, 96 elocutio 146n122 embodiment 77–8, 118, 144, 243 See also disembodiment; bodies emotions 6, 25, 63, 94, 162, 169, 190 enargeia 93–4, 96–7, 169 enphintlich (sensible/feeling) 11–12, 119, 140, 141 Epicureanism 39, 256–7 epilogismos 16 epistemology 6, 40–2, 44, 49–52, 72, 101, 159 in Bonaventure 19, 43–52 in Cordiale 198–203 in Descartes 253, 255, 259 in Luther 223, 242, 247–8 in Seuse 145–7 in “Treatise on Virtues,” 72, 75, 98–9 in Zerbolt 179–80 equivalence 79n48, 127, 140, 147, 243 Eriugena, John Scottus 147–8, 148n130 eschatology 3, 185, 216n31, 238, 260 eternity 47n116, 64, 74–5, 107, 149, 196, 198–9, 243, 251 ethismos 16 etymology 24, 27n43, 192–3 euphemism 252 See also sleep Eusebius 142 Everyman 1, 92–3 excerpting 158, 162–9, 172–3, 183, 187, 236 See also Trostsprüche exemplarity 9, 124n48, 156–7, 168, 183–4, 187–91, 194–5, 198–205 faith 15, 23, 35, 44–5, 47, 50, 55, 77, 198–202, 258 in Lutheranism 208, 209–11, 213n20, 215–18, 221–3, 225–7, 228–9, 235–6, 237–9 fear 6, 20–2, 25–7, 32, 40–1, 57–62, 65, 256 in Devotio Moderna 154, 167, 168, 175n84, 178, 190, 200–2 in Lutheranism 213–14, 219, 227, 237 in “Treatise on Virtues,” 67–8, 70, 73, 98, 100, 104n116 Folquet of Marseilles 202 fontale principium 133 See also wellspring, the Franciscan organization, the 15–16, 17, 17n14, 18n6, 155n4 Franck, Caspar 240, 246–7 funeral orations 232n90, 234, 235n100 funerals 241n119, 256n14 Gansfort, Wessel Scala meditationis 178n94 gates 56, 80–2, 85, 107, 180, 251

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gender 7, 141–2 Genette, Gérard 189n120 Geoffrey of Auxerre 204 Gerard van Vliederhoven 9 Cordiale, seu quatuor novissima (Cordial, or four last things) 116n22, 157–9, 184–92, 195–205 supplementary examples 190n122, 203n167 German (language) 126, 142 Germany 16, 116, 208, 226 Gerson, Jean 69 “going out” (virtual journey to afterlife) 66–8, 73, 75, 79, 82, 99, 104, 106–7 Goodman, Henry Nelson 161n26 Gospel, the 5, 84, 215–16, 222, 232, 237–9 grace 4, 35, 47, 63, 77, 103, 127, 129, 134, 144, 170, 200, 223, 229, 236, 237 age/time of 5, 210–11, 214–17, 227, 230 alone 209–10 images of 3, 218–19, 224 lack of 74, 76, 122n43, 174 gradualism 210 gradus. See steps grammar, 24 46, 107n28 Gregory the Great 70, 71n22, 73n25, 128, 187n113, 203n167 Dialogues 125, 198, 200 Gospel Homilies 167, 168, 169, 200n151 spiritual seeing 135 Grice, Herbert Paul 81n53 Grosch, Johann 234n95 Grote, Geert 154 Conclusa et proposita, non vota (Resolutions and Intentions, but not Vows) 160n23 letter to Johannes ten Water 154–6, 157 De quattuor generibus meditabilium (On the Four Classes of Subjects Suitable for Meditation) 159, 180 Güthel, Caspar Tröstliche Sermon (Consoling sermon) 223–4 Haas, Alois M. 79n46, 118n32 Hadrian (Emperor) 196 harp 128–9 See also psaltery headings 54, 161, 166, 172, 187n114, 261 hearing 24, 126–30, 132, 135, 138, 169–70, 222 and believing 211, 223, 225–7, 261 and seeing 112, 114–15, 220–21 heart, the 104, 148–9, 158, 223 enclosing scriptures in 208–9, 211 eyes of 135nn79–80, 146 imprinting/sealing/casting in 9, 143–5, 149–53, 183–4, 186, 189–90, 205

living 119, 126–9, 132 painting in 8, 94 purity of 166, 170, 173n75, 174 sending out 73, 80, 82 writing in 9, 113–15, 117–20, 132, 142–3, 151–2, 159–60, 236, 246 heaven 3, 28–9, 62–5, 85, 97–8, 104, 118, 138–9, 170n55, 178, 198, 202, 213–14, 218–19 hell 2, 15, 28–30, 57–8, 89–94, 96–98, 178–80, 198–202, 218–19, 224 hermeneutics 75, 231 Holy Spirit, the 46–7, 102n111, 103, 200, 208 and language 238, 240, 246–8, 250, 251–2 and the Word 209, 211 homo (derivation from humus) 192–3 horizons 70–2, 74–5, 79, 85, 88–90, 106–8, 138, 196, 206, 258 horizon-words 238–9, 251 Hugh of St. Victor 40, 42–3, 128 Didascalicon 6 Humbert of Romans De dono timoris (The gift of fear) 190, 199n147, 200, 203 humility 15, 190–3, 204, 219 Benedictine 21–2, 32–3 Franciscan 17n14 Ibn Sina (Avicenna) 134n73 iconography 84–5, 206, 212 Ignatius of Antioch 152 Ignatius Loyola 4, 222n54 Spiritual Exercises 1–2, 5n15, 16, 178, 226n69, 254–5, 260–1 illustrations (pictorial) 72, 83n62, 84–5, 88–93, 102, 130, 206 images 24, 25, 27, 82n55, 94, 102, 150, 156–7, 180, 247 in Bonaventure 36–8, 63, 94 in Descartes 253, 255 in Seuse 115, 124n50, 129n65, 148n131 untimely and counter- 3, 218–19, 224 See also illustrations; visions imagination 2, 37, 43, 81–2, 178n94, 180, 223, 251 in Aristotle 7, 50 in Augustine 72, 99–100, 135 lack of 208 imitation 23–4, 73, 77, 129 immanence 198–9, 202 immediacy 93, 96, 119, 169 of the divine 129, 130, 133, 134, 136 înkêr 145 inner senses 7, 64, 112–14, 117–20, 134–41, 144–9, 152, 223 interpretation 24, 34, 35n69, 136, 142 as meditative practice 230, 232, 235

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 Isidore of Seville 40, 128, 198 Etymologiae 24, 102n111, 193n129 Homilies 195, 197 iteration 189–91, 194, 203, 205 James of Voragine The Golden Legend 168, 172, 180 Jenisch, Paul Seelenschatz (Thesaurus of the soul) 213–14, 224n60, 227, 241, 246, 247–50 Jerome 65, 77, 143, 168, 187n113, 191n126 Jesuits 226, 260–1 John XXII 78n43 John of Fécamp 29, 30, 31 Jonas, Justus 231, 235n100 Joseph of Arimathea 233 judgment 1, 3–4, 30, 62, 67, 70, 102, 110, 163, 185, 207, 208, 258 day 21, 25–6, 70, 154 human 48–9, 51–2, 100–1, 253, 255, 257, 259 and earthly law court analogy 198–9 last 15, 32, 57–8, 71n21, 78, 84–5, 86–9, 89–90, 168–9, 172, 174–6, 187n113, 198–202, 213, 214, 260 particular 71, 84, 85, 90 universal 39, 71, 84, 88, 90 kairos 5, 63n173, 210, 215–20, 224, 227, 250 See also season Karnes, Michelle 7 Kegel, Philipp Geistliche Kampfschule 230n83 knowledge. See epistemology; scientia Kuppelich, Georg 227 ladders 18, 21–3, 30–8, 47, 182–3, 211, 224–5 See also steps (gradus) language 106, 147, 192–3, 212 analogist and literalist explanations of 243–8, 251 Lutheran “new,” 212, 237–9, 240–52 ordinary 79n48, 107–8, 212, 243, 244, 251 propriety in 72, 104–8, 250–1 See also Holy Spirit, the: and language; metaphor(s) Largier, Niklaus 7 last judgment. See judgment: last last rites 229n79 last things. See eschatology; heaven; hell; judgment; novissima; purgatory Laurent d’Orléans La Somme le Roi 66–7, 69–70, 72, 94 illustrations/illuminations 72, 83–9, 86–9, 90–1, 91

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Somme–Miroir du Monde recensions 69nn10–11, 70n17, 83, 85, 87 “Treatise on Vices,” 105 “Treatise on Virtues” and ars moriendi 67–85, 93, 96–9, 102–8, 212, 243, 251 and mental picturing 67, 72, 81, 82, 97 and spiritual exercise 70, 71, 102, 104 Law, the 237 laypeople 4, 6, 30 and Anselm 30–1, 57 and Bonaventure 15–16, 17, 57 and Moller 227, 230 and Somme la Roi 67, 68, 69–70, 102 Lazarus 203–5, 223, 225–6, 239 Leon, Johann Handbüchlein von diesem Jammertal seliglich abzusterben (Little handbook of blessed departure from this vale of tears) 233–4 Libellus auro praestantior de animae praeparatione . . . (Little book, more excellent than gold, on the preparation of the soul . . . ) 219 life 4, 106, 206, 215–19, 224, 229, 236–5, 248 literalism 37, 77, 243, 246, 252 liturgy 5, 24, 30, 59, 169, 170n55 logos, the 16–17 Low Countries, the 16, 116, 155n3 Luther, Martin 210–11, 232, 234, 252 and hearing 211, 220–3, 261 and language of sleep 238–9, 242–3, 247, 248 and preparation for his own death 230–1 psalter of 231, 235n100 and sola principles 13, 209–10 and time (kairos, grace) 5, 63n173, 210–11, 214–20 works: Commentary on Galatians 221–2 Lectures on Ecclesiastes 220 Sermon von der Bereitung zum Sterben (Sermon on Preparing to Die) 2–3, 5, 217–19, 224 Lyons, John D. 189n120 Macrobius Commentary on the Dream of Scipio 76–7 Magnus, Albertus 54 marginal glosses 117, 147, 166, 168n49 Maria of Anhalt-Zerbst 232–3 Martha and Mary 221–2, 223, 225–6 Mathesius, Johannes 231n85

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Matilda of Tuscany 30–1 Maurus, Hrabanus 40 McNamer, Sarah 7 medicine 16, 150 meditatio 32n61, 40, 42, 119 meditatio mortis 10, 26–7, 39–41, 43, 68, 77, 213n22, 255 Lutheran 211, 216–17, 223–6, 227 See also meletē thanatou Melanchthon, Philipp 234, 235 meletē thanatou 10, 19, 41–2, 48, 68, 77, 213, 255–7 See also meditatio mortis memorization 6, 24, 142–3, 165, 173, 228, 230–1, 234 metaphor(s) 80–2, 102, 107, 134, 153, 159, 161n26, 242–3 and demetaphorization 18, 31, 33–4, 38 and equivocation between metaphoric and literal 34–8, 244–51 impropriety of 107–8 and transvaluation 31, 36, 38 See also artisanship; Bonaventure: and metaphors; dead parchment; heart, the; clothing metaphors; ladders; monastery: as workshop; monastic cell: as infirmary; music; Seuse, Heinrich: and metaphors; sleep; soul and/as text; steps (gradus); tools (of the spiritual craft); unmasking; wellspring, the; words: as winding-sheet metaphysics 44–5, 46, 74, 253, 259 Miroir du Monde 69, 70, 71, 72, 94n86, 105 Somme le Roi–Miroir recensions 69nn10–11, 70n17, 83, 85, 87 Moller, Martin 9 Manuale de praeparatione ad mortem (Handbook of preparation for death) 9, 227–30, 236–40, 250–2 Mombaer, Jan Rosetum exercitiorum spiritualium et sacrarum meditationum 179n94 monastery, the 7, 17, 19, 39 as workshop 10, 18, 21, 27–8 monastic cell 27–9, 60n157, 106n123, 202 as infirmary 27–8 monasticism 19–20, 23–4, 26, 38–9, 41 See also orthopraxis: monastic Montaigne, Michel de “That to philosophize is to learn to die” (“Que Philosopher, c’est apprendre à mourir”) 256–7, 261 Moses 101, 181–2, 183, 244 multiplication (of examples) 189–91, 194, 203–5

Munich morality play (Münchner Spiel vom sterbenden Menschen) 1, 3, 4, 5n15, 8, 116n22 Musculus, Andreas Bedencks Ende (Remember the end) 213, 226–7 music 119, 126–30, 132, 133 mysticism (German) 145 Nadási, Johannes Calendarium novum ad bene moriendum perquam utile 260n26 names (of the divine) 119, 132, 143–4, 147, 148n130, 150–3 Neoplatonism 42, 44, 74, 135 New Devotion/Devout. See Devotio Moderna Newman, Barbara 6, 8, 118n32, 141n103 normative centering 209, 211, 224, 229 notabilia puncta 160n23 notebooks 161–2, 232, 234, 236n102 See also rapiaria notitia excessiva 47–8 novissima 3, 212, 213, 226 obedience 27–8, 128, 227 Office of the Dead 30, 169 ordering of one’s life 160–1 of the soul 209, 236 of text 158, 161, 162, 166, 173, 183–5 ordinare 161 ordinatio 161, 162n29 Origen 7, 32n63, 134–6 orthodoxy 23 orthopoiesis 23 orthopraxis 4, 23–4 meditational 25 monastic 29–30, 31, 36, 94n85, 183 Otho, Johann Jacob Evangelischer Krankentrost (Evangelical consolation for the sick) 261 Otther, Jacob Christlich leben und sterben (Christian living and dying) 238 painting in the heart. See heart, the: painting in passion, the 7, 168, 209, 236 in Bonaventure 52–5, 63 in Radewijns 166, 171, 172 in Seuse 112, 120–4, 126, 128–33 pastoral revolution 4 Paul, Saint 39, 77–8, 99, 101, 123, 127, 136n80, 221

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 Peraldus, William Summa de virtutibus 70, 102n111 Summa de vitiis 105 perspectives 64–5, 118, 127, 177–8, 204 and language 237, 240, 242–3, 248–51 Peter of Blois 187n113, 193–4, 203n169, 204 Peter of Celle 26–7, 29, 94n85 Pfeffinger, Johann Trostbüchlein über den unzeitlichen Tod (Book of consolation for untimely death) 231–2 Philip III of France 66 Philip IV of France 69n14, 83n62 philosophy 16–17, 19, 38–49, 52, 54–5, 60, 139n97, 161n24, 254–8, 260–1 Pierre d’Abernon Lumere as lais 67, 71n21 Plato 19, 78, 187n113, 197, 213n22, 257 Phaedo 41–2, 49, 73n26, 76–7, 186n109, 255 See also meletē thanatou Platonism 39n84, 74n30, 78, 139n97 pleasure 109, 138, 175n82, 201, 204, 256 practice of death. See meditatio mortis; meletē thanatou Pranger, M. B. 7 prayer 2, 32, 98, 120, 124n49, 171n61, 214 in Anselm 31, 59 Lutheran 223n55, 228, 234n95, 250 monastic 5, 7, 17, 24 prayer books 6, 218, 231, 232, 234 processus 186–7, 190, 205 proposita 160n23 proprietas 250 See also language: propriety in prosopopoeia 96, 118n32, 257 Prosper of Aquitaine 165n36, 195, 196–7 psaltery 128–30, 132 Pseudo-Augustine 94, 176 Pseudo-Bernard of Clairvaux 58, 187n113 Meditationes piissimae 61, 168, 180 Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite 147, 148n129 psychology 6–7, 44, 175, 223, 226 Aristotelian 50 Augustinian 72, 99–101 scholastic 134 purgative way, the 32, 167, 170–1, 174 purgatory 1, 3, 67, 93, 96, 98, 102, 104–5, 113–14, 202 refutation by Protestants 238, 247n132 replacement of judgment by 70–1, 84–5 Quinos, Bruno 232n90, 234 Quintilian 107, 189, 250

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Radewijns, Florens 160, 163, 164 Libellus (Little book) 157–9, 164–72, 176–7, 180–1 “On Death,” 166–7, 171 Tractatulus devotus (Little treatise for the devout) 157–9, 164–5, 170–7 spiritual exercises modeled on Bonaventure 170–1 rapiaria 162–3, 165, 166n40, 166n42, 187, 236 See also notebooks rapture 100–2, 118, 135n80 readers in Anselm 57, 59–60 in Cordiale 184, 186, 190–2, 202, 205 and their own meditations 171, 175 reading 5–8, 20, 24–5, 31, 59, 94, 129, 160–2, 164–5, 190 repetitious 6, 156–7 recomposition 158, 164, 173, 175, 177, 181, 183–4, 236 redemption 3, 55, 77, 171n60, 210, 235 Reformation, the (Protestant) 3–4, 13, 116, 209, 214n25, 223, 238 remorse 96, 178, 235, 260 repentance 3, 4, 111, 209, 216–18, 226–8 repetition 6, 156–7, 187–92, 205 See also iteration; multiplication Revelation, Book of 29, 84, 90, 91, 180, 181 rewriting 162, 205 See also copying (of text) rhetoric 5–6, 8, 24–5, 31, 35n69, 59, 93, 191n125 in Bonaventure 18, 20, 34, 38, 46, 59, 94 in Devotio Moderna 159, 163, 169, 175–6, 185–8, 198, 205 in Lutheranism 215n28, 229, 242, 244, 250, 252 in Seuse 118–19, 146 in “Treatise on Virtues,” 72, 80, 82, 93–4, 96–7 Rice, Nicole R. 8 Richard of Salisbury 26 Richard of St. Victor 42–3 righteousness 221–2 See also cloak of righteousness Rode, Jan van Des Coninx Summe 70n17, 76n37 Rörer, Georg 232 roses 110, 129, 130–1, 149n132, 196 Rouse, Richard H., and Mary A. Rouse 83n62 Rubidge, Bradley 255n10 rubrics 72n24, 102, 162, 166, 168–9, 170n55 Rudolf of Biberach 144–5 rumination 5, 24, 142–3, 158, 164–5, 168, 173 Rupert of Deutz 29, 40, 150n138

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Ruusbroec, Jan van Vanden kerstenen ghelove (The Christian Faith) 156 sacraments 144, 145, 221 salvation 1, 5, 29, 46, 90, 102, 118, 186, 214 Lutheran 208, 210, 214–15, 217, 220, 225, 227, 237, 250 Sarrazin, John 147 Schart, Markus 2 scholasticism 7, 44, 79n46, 134, 161 Schweinitz, David von Hundert evangelische Todesgedanken (One hundred evangelical thoughts on death) 261 scientia 69n8, 101n109, 134n75 scripture. See Bible, the Searle, John R. 81nn52–3 season 3, 210, 215, 219–20, 247, 248n133 See also kairos seeing 61, 63, 74–5, 93, 96–9, 101, 218, 224, 249–50 corporeal (visio corporalis) 72, 99–102 and hearing 114–15, 220–1 intellectual (visio intellectualis) 42–3, 72, 99–102, 159 spiritual (visio spiritalis) 72, 99–102, 124n50, 135, 159 See also beatific vision; inner senses; visions Selnecker, Nikolaus 234n95 Seneca 82n57, 187n113, 256 sensation 2, 100, 118, 134, 144–6, 149, 239 of God 129–30, 133, 136 senses, the (outer, corporeal) 2, 40, 49–52, 60n157 in Aristotle 50–2 in Augustine 42, 99–101 in Bonaventure 37, 46, 51–2, 60n157, 63 in Descartes 253, 257 in Plato 19, 41, 49, 255 in Seuse 128, 134–6, 143–6 in “Treatise on Virtues,” 71–2, 99, 103, 104 See also inner senses sententiae 187–90, 191n125, 194, 198, 199 sermocinatio 176 Seuse, Heinrich 116, 148n131, 152, 170n55, 212, 218n39 and divine illumination 123, 126, 128, 133 and inner senses 112–14, 117–20, 134–41, 144–9, 152 and metaphors 117–19, 123, 127–33, 142–4, 146–53 and writing/sealing in the heart 113–15, 117–20, 132, 142–5, 143–53

works: Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit (Little Book of Eternal Wisdom) 109–34, 136–53, 155, 157n12 Dutch translations of 155 “How to Learn to Die” chapter 110, 112, 114–16, 220n45 “Hundred Contemplations,” 116n26, 121, 122n42, 124 illustrations in 130, 131 and writer’s block 121–3 “Exemplar,” 116, 117n28, 123n46, 129n65, 130, 151 Horologium sapientiae (“Clock of Wisdom”) 114–16, 121n40, 125n53, 137n88, 141n103, 155–7, 167, 181 Vita (Life) 122n44, 130n67, 132n68, 135, 151 similes 96n92, 104n116, 127, 195–6, 242, 244 sin 2, 49–50, 145, 170, 209, 218, 224, 235, 236 sins of the tongue 105–6 Sirach 7:40 1, 21, 61, 71n21, 211, 212–3, 258 woodcut illustration of 206, 207 sleep 238–44, 246–8, 250–2 Smaragdus of Saint-Mihiel Expositio in Regulam 25–6 sola principles (Lutheran) 13, 209–10 soul and/as text 156, 159–61, 205, 211, 236 Spangenberg, Johannes Ein neu Trostbüchlein 230nn83–4 Specker, Melchior Vom leiblichen Todt (On the death of the body) 212n19, 214n22, 243–4 speculatio 42–3, 47 Speculum morale 71n21, 228n75 Spenser, Edmund 69 spiritual exercise(s) 4, 28 in Bonaventure 6, 15–20, 31–5, 38, 41, 43, 57, 60–3 in Descartes 254 in Devotio Moderna 157–9, 162–4, 170–1, 174, 181–3 Lutheran aversion to 208, 211, 222–3, 225–8 in “Treatise on Virtues,” 68, 70–1, 76n37, 82, 85, 96–7, 102, 104 Stagel, Elsbeth 135, 152 Stephen of Bourbon Tractatus 228n75 steps (gradus) 32n63, 211 in the Benedictine Rule 18, 21–3, 32n63, 33 in Bonaventure 18, 31–8, 47, 52, 54–5, in Brenz 224–5 in Zerbolt 174–5, 181–4 Stoicism 39, 256 subject and object 119, 140, 250

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 suicide 73, 75–7 Suso. See Seuse, Heinrich Sutell, Johannes Historia von Lazaro (History of Lazarus) 214n22, 225–6 syntactic connectors 175 taste 2, 135, 143–4, 149 textuality 5–6, 8–9, 20, 126–9, 157–66, 169, 183, 205 See also ordering: of text; recomposition; soul and/as text; writing Thanhöltzner, Thomas Sterbekunst (Art of dying) 206–9, 211 woodcut illustration in 206, 207, 212 theology of piety 209 Thomas of Kempen 155n6, 160–1 Imitation of Christ 116, 162–3 Tillich, Paul 215n29 time 2–3, 63, 70–1, 94, 118, 141–2, 171 See also grace: age/time of; kairos tools (of the spiritual craft) 18, 21–3, 25, 28, 30–2, 37, 182 touch 2, 119–20, 129–30, 132, 135, 141, 143–4, 148–9, 152–3 transcendence 8, 52, 99, 198–200, 202–3 experience of 19, 118–19, 145, 199–200 of God 19, 147–8, 210 transcendent reality 19, 41, 49 transience 75, 168, 206 transvaluation 77, 107 of metaphors 31, 36, 38 “Treatise on Virtues.” See under Laurent d’Orléans: La Somme le Roi tropes 80, 107–8, 212, 251–2 Trostsprüche (consolatory maxims) 228–36, 261 Ubi sunt? topos 96n92, 194–8 Ulrich, Abraham 235–6 unlived experience 118–19, 141 unmasking 248–50 Van Engen, John 155n3 Vérard, Antoine 92 Véron, François Manuale Sodalitatis 254n5, 260n26

via dolorosa 121n38 Victorines, the 17, 32n61 See also Hugh of St. Victor; Richard of St. Victor Vincent of Beauvais 71n21 Speculum maius 228n75 Vischer, Christoph the Elder Trostschrift 230n83 vision. See seeing Vision of Tnugdalus 180 visions 8, 42–3, 72, 99–101, 136–9, 200–2 examples of 22, 35–6, 122–3, 126, 129, 132, 168, 180 See also beatific vision, seeing Water, Johannes ten 154–6 wellspring, the 132–3, 138–9, 142 William of Auvergne 75 William of Ockham 54 William of St. Thierry 106n126, 144–5 Golden Epistle 27–9, 60n157, 165 William of Waddington Manuel des pechiez 67 wisdom (sapientia) 39–40, 43, 45, 73–4, 101n109, 112, 133, 144–5 Wolfgang, Prince of Anhalt-Köthen 233 Word, the 6, 118, 146, 211, 221, 229, 240, 252 words 145–6 as winding-sheet 229–30, 236–7 works (good) 1, 61, 102, 210, 214 in Lutheranism 5, 210, 214, 221–3 tools of 21, 32 writing 142, 161–2, 205, 230, 232 See also copying (of text); heart, the: writing in Zerbolt, Gerard, van Zutphen 9, 12, 173 De spiritualibus ascensionibus (Spiritual Ascents) 157–9, 163–4, 173–84 directed exercises 175, 181 Tractatus devotus de reformacione virium anime (Devout treatise on the reformation of the powers of the soul) 157–9, 163–4, 173–5, 177–8, 180n95

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