Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Peter Brown
Read between
January 10 - January 11, 2019
also scenes of rare moments of serenity,
they deliberately turned upside down the codes of the elites from which they were recruited.
These dramatic acts of role inversion may well have been particularly significant among the newly formed aristocracies of eastern Francia,
they invariably addressed each other as peccator—as “fellow sinners.”
as if the Frankish kingdom itself were a great monastery.
eclipsed by a strong sense of group holiness.
it had become an exchange in which the poor were absent. Monks and nuns replaced the poor as the intercessors par excellence.
a militarized upper class replaced the civilian elites of Roman times) and monasteries and convents that radiated a raw sacrality.
These monasteries and convents were seen as powerhouses of prayer.
they prayed for the souls of their founders and donors.
But the message of Jonas, unlike that of Salvian, was optimistic: It was possible for good nuns to face, without danger, the threatening world beyond the grave.
even good lay patrons might hope to do the same.
For persons of an earlier generation, venia—“forgiveness”—could only be gained at the feet of great male saints as they lay in their splendid tombs on the outskirts of the ancient cities of Gaul.
the monasteries and convents of seventh-century Francia acted as antechambers to the afterlife.
In these visions, God was strangely absent. He was veiled in impenetrable splendor.
The fate of the soul was determined by precise, personal sins that had not yet been purged by penance in the land of the living.
their sins had nothing to do with sex. Money was what mattered.
With this solemn ritual, the primal Christian gesture of almsgiving for the expiation of the soul was delineated with crystalline clarity.
Gifts from the sinful were a constant issue at this time.
the deepest anxieties of this great age of pious giving.
There is very little in the dramatic debates between angels and demons in the visions of Fursa and of Barontus that Augustine had not considered (if with far greater hesitation) in his capacious works.
would end with great monasteries, regular confession, the emergence of purgatory, and the great Divina Commedia of Dante Alighieri.
To conclude: What did Western Christianity leave behind in these centuries?
dominated by the notion of sin, punishment, and reward.
This image of the cosmos had already begun to weaken in Christian circles even in the third century.
It is this intensely hierarchical image of the cosmos that slowly but surely waned in the back of Christian minds.
Augustine upheld a democracy of souls.
we begin to hear the dead themselves asking for the prayers of the living:
When the bond between the living and the dead, constantly cemented by the rituals of the church, became a cosmos of its own—a subject of deep preoccupation, the stuff of visions, and the object of the regular prayers and donations of millions—then we can say, around the year 650 AD, that the ancient world truly died in Western Europe.
without the poor!
