The Ransom of the Soul: Afterlife and Wealth in Early Western Christianity

by Peter Brown

the shifts and struggles within the Christian communities that caused certain notions of the afterlife to emerge with unusual urgency at certain times, for reasons that were never exclusively theological.

What I myself have learned, when writing this book, is that some of the most decisive changes in the Christian imagination cannot be linked in any direct way to the brisk pace of history as it is conventionally related in textbooks of the history of the fall of Rome and the beginning of the Middle Ages.

These dark imaginings defy our attempts to link them to known political and social crises.

it is the business of the historian to dig deeper to look for the roots of these changes in phenomena that are not always those privileged by conventional narratives of the period.

Cyprian was a dominant figure in the creation of a Christian view of the afterlife.

For a martyr, there was no “afterlife,” only the instant presence of God.

The need to persuade average Christians to live up to their faith ensured that, in the Carthage of Cyprian as elsewhere, the issue of the deaths of the martyrs riveted the attention of contemporaries (pagans as well as Christians).

Normal death was of little interest; martyrdom was special.

Christians were seen by pagans as suicidal exhibitionists.

The notion of the afterlife was dwarfed, in Tertullian’s thought, by the idea of the transformation of the entire universe associated with the Christian doctrine of the Resurrection.

Tertullian imagined it to be so majestic, so radical, and so total as to make the interval between death and the Resurrection of the dead seem short and empty of significance.

for Tertullian (and for many others), thought of the Big Future (the Future with a capital F) associated with the Resurrection and the Last Judgment left little room for thought on the little future (the future with a lowercase f): the future of the individual soul after death.

It blocked certain imaginative options when Christians thought of death.

the Christian denial of the outright immortality of the soul. Many Christian thinkers thought that to speak of the soul as immortal gave too much autonomy to it.

Christians died for the Resurrection, not for the immortality of their souls.

Tertullian (and many other leading Christians of his time) regarded belief in the immortality of the soul not only as arrogant but as trivial.

The reintegration of all creation, of all society, and of every human body was regarded by Christians as a far greater thing than was the ethereal flight of the soul to the stars.

far more—than the mere immortality of the soul.

Christian souls were expected to wait until they were reunited with their bodies. Only then could they be thought to enjoy the fullness of God’s new creation.

Only the souls of the martyrs escaped this shadowy time of waiting.

images that had always meant much to persons of the ancient Mediterranean and the Middle East.

in a society that placed a high value on leisure as a privilege of the elite,

They did not ask for more. Modern persons find this notion of the afterlife puzzlingly incomplete—as would Julian of Toledo.

A high-pitched, Platonic notion of the soul as an utterly spiritual substance, entitled to the immediate enjoyment of the vision of God, had begun to spread in Christian circles

a view of the soul as immediately bound for heaven after death won out in Latin Christianity.

that they should wait until God had brought about a mighty transformation of the universe as a whole—was lost in Western Christianity.

There was little room left in the early Christian imagination for an interest in individual destinies and for the emergence of individual profiles among the departed.

The “little future” of the world between death and the Resurrection was now examined as minutely as was the “Big Future” of the end of time. Julian and Idalius wanted to know exactly what their souls would be like in that intermediate period.

Above all, unlike Cyprian, Julian was concerned with the death and afterlife of average Christians, not the unique deaths of the martyrs.

Rather than a vast waiting room (as it was for Tertullian), the Christian other world had become like a present-day city marathon.

Last but not least, Julian was convinced that a purifying fire awaited some souls, through which they had to pass, each at its own speed.

It was this growing attention to the destinies of individual souls in terms of the precise admixture of their sins and merits that made the world of Julian of Toledo so very different from that of Cyprian of Carthage.

What could the living do for the dead, and what were the social repercussions of their efforts?

The austere Tertullian found nothing strange in a husband making annual offerings at the Eucharist for the spirit of his departed wife. She may not have been a sinner. But she was still marking time, and, in that sense, she was closer to her former, still living spouse than she was to the awesomely complete, unshaken martyrs.

The sense that the living could do something about the dead gave a much-needed sense of agency to the average believer.

one can sense the silent pressure of an entire society.

Wealth came to play a role in linking the liv...

a virtual arms race of pious practices by which the wealthy—and that far wider group who wished to imitate the wealthy—sought to protect, nourish, and eventually bring home to heav...

precautions taken by the rich to secure privileged burial for their loved ones beside the shrines of the martyrs

mainly through donations designed to protect their souls and those of their relatives and loved ones.

a remarkable succession of bishops and Christian writers attempted to hold the rich to account against the backdrop of an afterlife that was portrayed by them in ever-more vivid and menacing colors

These monasteries and convents were treated as powerhouses of prayer on behalf of the souls of the departed.

Belief in the existence of such links enabled the rich to care for their dead with ever-more demonstrative splendor.

There would have been less beauty in the late antique world if there had been less concern for the link between this world and the next that was established at the grave.

stormy debates as to the proper use of wealth in society in general and for the care of the dead in particular.

Such embarrassment is calculated to make the historian of religion sit up and take notice.

Perhaps it is we who are strange. Why is it that we have such inhibitions in approaching the subject of the joining of God and gold?

Furthermore, on a more subliminal level, the notion of treasure in heaven gripped the imagination because it seemed to join apparent incommensurables.

If the brutal antithesis between heaven and earth, pure spirit and dull matter, could be overcome in this way, then all other divisions might be healed.

Hence we should not imagine that the relation between rich and poor in Christian circles was governed only by compassion and by a sense of social justice.