Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Peter Brown
Read between
January 10 - January 11, 2019
the drama of penance suited the churches of southern Gaul. Let us see why that was so.
The first steps in the conversion to the religious life of these young Provençal aristocrats usually took the form of a fully public adoption of the lifestyle traditionally associated with penitents.
It existed to serve the two highly charged and paradoxical poles of the Christian imagination: the socially dead and the physically dead—the poor and the souls of the departed.
not only supported the poor but had the power to obtain the forgiveness of sins.
474 he wrote the de gratia (On Grace) as a firm rebuff to the teachings of extreme supporters of Augustine.
Faustus insisted that a bishop had a duty to rebuke and change the world around him.
meant taking on the nobility of Gaul.
This austere notion of penance gave him a lever on the hearts of the great.
a mere moment of regret on one’s deathbed was not enough.
Faustus also rejected the Augustinian notion of the immaterial soul.
A sense of hurry settled over Western Christianity as a whole at this time.
a sense of the approach of Judgment that had already developed across the continent of Europe.
settle down to business as usual—to penance, almsgiving, and the elimination of sin.
not one of apocalyptic dread, it was a strenuous mood of reform.
the term “barbarian kingdoms” is a misnomer. Supported and largely staffed by the local Roman elites, these kingdoms were downsized versions of the empire.
penitential piety,
joined the last days of the empire to the first centuries of the postimperial kingdoms of the West.
By the year 600, crown, nobles, and the church had come together to form a single ruling class in which Franks, Romans, Burgundians, and other groups mingled easily.
group penance.
They did not turn Gaul into a moral police state. In modern parlance, these laws were “aspirational” laws.
To put it briefly, by taking notice of sins, the Frankish kings showed that they could act like the Christian Roman emperors of the West in the fifth century and like the formidable Roman emperors of the East in the sixth century.
In an untidy society, made up of different, conflicting groups, at least all members of a Christian kingdom could be treated as potential sinners whose behavior needed to be patrolled.
It was in the name of preparation for the Last Judgment that the preaching of repentance gathered momentum in the monasteries and cities of southern Gaul.
if they neglected to expiate their sins by gifts to the church.
They wished to make the Last Judgment present to their readers and hearers through gripping representations of heaven and, especially, of hell.
Held back by the mercy of God
through the saints,
He preached through history and through tales of the saints.
the Gaul of his times. He does not lament an irreparably ruined country. Rather, he reveals a society where the rich had become indecently affluent:
But Gregory meant no such thing.
to witness miracles of healing at the shrines of the saints was to catch a glimpse of the Big Future—of the mighty transformation that would take place at the end of time.
the Resurrection maintained the fierce hope of a better world beyond that judgment.
They were as mixed and as restless a bunch of persons as they had always been.
“Christianity had become sufficiently universal to retain in its own bosom those who challenged it.”
How much could average Christians expect to share in the glory of the heroes and heroines of their faith?
similar debates were happening in contemporary Constantinople.
Both men were concerned to show that the vibrant souls of the saints were still very much alive, and that the souls of average Christian believers would also enjoy a vivid afterlife, even if, in their case, their continued life beyond the grave was less evident than in the case of the saints.
This meant, in effect, that the past was never past. Long-dead saints were still present and active at their shrines,
for Gregory and his contemporaries, the fate of the soul after death had come to seem ever more fraught with danger.
Gregory added an autumnal sharpness to the theme. He picked up stories that spoke of the passing of the soul as a long and perilous journey. It was a journey increasingly interrupted by demonic “checkpoints” where souls were challenged to give accounts of their sins.
anxieties concerning the passing of the soul after death had intensified over the years.
The moral of this story was plain. Except for a few saints, no passage to heaven was easy. The soul required all the prayers that it could get, and especially the prayers of holy persons, whether living or dead, to reach the presence of Christ after death.
Augustine had disassociated himself from views that, in his opinion, exaggerated the power of the saints to obtain amnesty from Christ.
They rested on the current image of Christ as an emperor, exercising the supreme imperial prerogative of mercy in response to the intercessions of the saints.
It is this high-pitched view of the Last Judgment that accounted for the mounting fortunes of the church.
Those who gave alms to the poor and endowments to the churches and monasteries did so, quite bluntly, pro remedio animae—“to heal and protect their souls” in the afterlife and, above all, at the Last Judgment.
Venia—“mere forgiveness”—was costly for the great.
to make elaborate preparations for one’s death was as good a way as any to display one’s present wealth and power—and to do so in an eminently acceptable manner: as a repentant fellow Christian.
the intensity with which he insisted that the other world breaks in upon the human race also in our time.
His belief in the power of the saints as the bearers of God’s justice was harnessed to the pursuit of a serious program of reform and consolidation in Gaul.
