As dawn was breaking on 3 November 824, a monk named Wetti “woke up” after what had definitively been the worst night of his life.Footnote 1 Three days previously, according to the monks’ common practice, Wetti had taken a draught for his health (potio ad providendam salutem corporis), but in this case it generated a sudden and violent reaction.Footnote 2 While the draught was likely intended to act as a purgative, its effects were to completely disrupt Wetti's system: he vomited up undigested food, suffered severe pains in his belly, and could not consume sufficient nourishment. But Tuesday night brought the most disturbing after-effect: as Wetti lay weak in his bed, a horde of demons appeared to torment him. Fortunately, God's angels came to his assistance, and one such angel took Wetti on a spiritually edifying journey. He was able to witness the abode of the saints and the purgatorial punishments of sinners, each enduring a form of suffering tailored to his or her particular crimes. After a long sermon from the angel about the need for Wetti and his contemporaries to correct their way of life, the monk awoke, immediately instructed his abbot about all that he had seen and heard, and began singing psalms and entreating prayers for the forgiveness of his sins. He died the next day.
The Vision of Wetti, produced in two different versions (prose and verse) at the monastery of Reichenau, was the first in a long series of visionary texts that appeared across the Carolingian realm starting in the 820s.Footnote 3 As Paul Dutton has so evocatively illuminated, these texts served not simply as forceful calls to spiritual repentance, echoing similar themes to the reforming mandates issued by Carolingian kings and ecclesiastical councils, but they were also experiments in a new style of veiled political criticism, directed in large part at the kings themselves.Footnote 4 One of the more memorable moments in Wetti's journey was the sight of the deceased Charlemagne suffering from beasts tearing at his genitals as penalty for sexual immorality — an episode that Dutton has set within an intensifying wave of censure directed toward the royal family during the early reign of Louis the Pious.Footnote 5 Criticism for a range of different faults would continue to pursue the Carolingian dynasty in visions written at various “dream factories” up through the 880s.Footnote 6
As a distinct mode of writing about otherworldly journeys, the Vision of Wetti has likewise been seen to catalyze the emergence of a new genre, one that would unfurl toward Dante's fourteenth-century Divine Comedy.Footnote 7 Historians such as Yitzhak Hen and Claude Carozzi have debated whether to locate the origins of a medieval visionary genre in the seventh or the ninth centuries: the seventh century witnessed the first attempts to write extended Latin narratives about the soul leaving and returning to the body, but it was not until the 820s that visions began to circulate widely as independent texts rather than elements within hagiography, sermons, or historical accounts.Footnote 8 Given the way in which these visions mapped the fate of individual souls in the afterlife, scholarship has concentrated on their role in the development of a doctrine of purgatory.Footnote 9 While the theological space of purgatory may not have been established by conciliar decree until the thirteenth century, thinkers such as Bede had already elaborated upon Augustine's and Gregory the Great's theories about post-mortem purification, and Carolingian visionary texts probed further into the times and places of purgatorial punishment.Footnote 10
However, it is not Wetti's contribution to modes of early medieval criticism, the crystallization of new genres, or sharpening conceptions of a purgatorial landscape that concern me here. As the authors of Wetti's vision participated in the above three developments, they were compelled to grapple with a fundamental conundrum, one that lay at the heart of the entire penitential system within which the visionary encounter was implicated. This was the practicalities of the soul-body relationship, a relationship grounded in a notion of binaries.Footnote 11 Alongside, and in conjunction with, the dichotomy of corporeal and incorporeal, body and soul were often mapped onto the binary of this world and the other world. While the soul existed on earth and the body would be resurrected into heaven or hell, this world, being material, was the domain of the body, and the afterlife, being the spiritual realm, aligned with the nature of the soul. This division of the cosmos was an ancient one. It is evident in the arguments that late antique philosophers leveled against Christian doctrines of the bodily resurrection — namely, that the body was composed primarily of the heaviest of the four elements and could not possibly dwell in the almost immaterial fire of the heavens.Footnote 12 It is evident in Augustine of Hippo's rebuttal of those claims, where he pointed out that if the immaterial soul was trapped within the heavier elements now, “will souls not at some point be able to raise earthly bodies up on high?”Footnote 13
But it was not the doctrine of the resurrection that seems to have most troubled Christians of the Carolingian kingdom. Rather, it was a problem of liminality, a conception of the afterlife that was segmented and implied a problematic separation between soul and body. This intermediate afterlife (the “little future of the soul” in the words of Peter Brown or the “postmortal” according to Ellen Muehlberger) was the period of time after death and before the Last Judgment, at which point the resurrection of all bodies would occur.Footnote 14 Not only was this an uncharted expanse of time, neither marked by the stages of life as witnessed on earth nor limitless like the eternal judgment would be, but it was also the only period of an individual's entire existence when soul and body were separated.
The visionary genre developed by Carolingian intellectuals engaged primarily with this intermediate afterlife for the very reason that it was unstable — it was a point at which God's judgment had become manifest and could still be amended.Footnote 15 The visionary's sighting of souls undergoing punishment was not intended to be simply descriptive. It was meant to be electrifying: the protagonist's difficult journey “beyond” the body and back again to report to the living would, it was hoped, engineer a release from the punishments that were currently holding the souls of the dead.Footnote 16 The visionary thus served as a crucial link between the living and dead, but, in performing this task, he or she also undermined the strict separation between material and nonmaterial worlds.
Visionaries whose souls came and went freely between earthly and otherworldly realms, seemingly untethered to the flesh in a systematic way, compromised the coherence of the body-soul attachment. This was no mere personal conundrum, but could be seen to threaten the very bedrock of penitential reasoning, wherein the soul was forever marked by sins committed while in the body but could also be purged of those sins by bodily penance, whether performed before an individual's death or by the intercession of those still living.Footnote 17 The disconnect between the helplessness of dis-embodied souls in the afterlife and the helpfulness of embodied souls on earth is a particularly prominent message in ninth-century visions, which, as Richard Pollard has demonstrated, placed newfound emphasis on the utility of intercession, especially intercessory prayer for the dead.Footnote 18 The visionary served an important purpose in revealing the need for (and efficacy of) intercession yet did little to uphold the stability of individual identity, a matter of pressing concern to the pastoral agenda of the Carolingian reforms.
This article takes stock of ten different accounts of journeys to the otherworld that were composed within the Carolingian realm over the ninth century.Footnote 19 Its particular focus on the dynamics of the visionary experience reveals that authors took great care with how they crafted these “truthful reports.”Footnote 20 Ninth-century visions diverged at crucial points with models set by late antique and more recent Merovingian and Insular writers; at the same time, they converged in heretofore unacknowledged ways with theology developed in contemporaneous treatises about the soul. These details suggest that, while Carolingian authors were excited by the possibilities of this nascent genre, they were also aware of its vulnerabilities. Above all, they were committed to a form of storytelling that buttressed the unity of soul and body and the finality of death, even if this came at the expense of a more dramatic and vivid narrative.Footnote 21
Stifling the Imagination
Around the year 800, Alcuin composed the treatise On the Nature of the Soul in response to a query from Charlemagne's cousin Gundrada.Footnote 22 The first Latin exposition on the constitution and function of the soul to be written in several hundred years, Alcuin's work proved immensely popular with his contemporaries and has been viewed as setting a clear direction for Carolingian theological thought over the ninth century.Footnote 23 Defining the soul as “a discerning and rational spirit always in motion, always living . . . created to rule the movements of the body, invisible, incorporeal, without weight, without color, circumscribed yet whole in every member of its body,” On the Nature of the Soul adhered carefully to the beliefs of Augustine of Hippo who promoted a Neoplatonic argument for a strictly incorporeal soul.Footnote 24 Given Alcuin's unparalleled intellectual status, the assumption has been that his treatise settled the contours of the soul as securely Augustinian at the moment when medieval theology began to take shape.Footnote 25
However, Alcuin's treatise failed to address certain fundamental questions about the soul's life within the body, just as Augustine's writings had failed to alleviate the concerns of his contemporaries several centuries earlier.Footnote 26 In a dialogue from the 380s, On the Magnitude of the Soul, Augustine and his interlocutor, a friend (and future bishop) named Evodius of Uzalis, engage in a friendly debate over a thorny theological question — the nature of the soul's substance. Evodius had proposed a more material type of soul, one that was physically diffused throughout the body, like the blood, and grew in size along with the body. Against this, Augustine sought to prove that the soul was not contained within the body because it did not possess the qualities of size or strength; as an incorporeal being, it was neither localized to a specific place nor affected by changes to its bodily home.Footnote 27 Even though, at one point in the dialogue, Evodius declares that if the soul is not located in the body “I do not know where I am,” like a good Socratic interlocutor, he ends the dialogue in total agreement with Augustine's theses.Footnote 28
We witness, however, in a letter from Evodius to Augustine from 414 that the bishop of Uzalis continued to have doubts, triggered in particular by the recent death of one of his young notaries.Footnote 29 In contemplating this boy's passing out of the flesh, he revealed a deep anxiety about how the soul could even exist without a body. “When we exit from the body and escape every burden and the pervasiveness of sin, who are we?”Footnote 30 On the one hand, Evodius was convinced that the soul experienced an unburdening after the death of the body and was able to perform its intellectual functions more easily without such encumbrances. On the other hand, Evodius worried about how an incorporeal soul could retain its form and identity once it separated from the body; he surmised that, without material boundaries, every soul would, in effect, become one single substance drawn together from all incorporeal souls.Footnote 31 The lack of a bodily vessel meant that there could be no differentiation and thus, most importantly, no reward or punishment for a holy life. Evodius wanted Augustine to confirm that, in fact, the soul was never unaccompanied and either received a new body upon the dissolution of its bonds with flesh or else exited the dead flesh in “some kind of body,” which Evodius proposed might be formed of an insubstantial element like air or ether. Furthermore, he added, it seemed probable that this body possessed at least some of the five senses, so that the soul could function in a material universe.Footnote 32
Evodius's timeline, then, proposed three lives for the soul: the first, with a body composed of the four elements; the second, with a body made of ether or a similar insubstantial material; and the third, for eternity, with the resurrected body. Yet, if he hoped for confirmation of this timeline from the great Augustine, Evodius did not receive it. When it came to the soul's existence after death, Augustine became uncharacteristically terse, as Peter Brown has argued. In general, his large corpus worked to stifle postmortem imaginings as much as possible, reflecting, as it did, Augustine's own belief that certainty about what happened after death might create complacency during a Christian's life on earth.Footnote 33
Vision texts are not typically classed as a form of theological writing, but their authors were forced to confront the soul's “bodily-ness” in a way that other writers were not.Footnote 34 Just as God was described as speaking, thinking, and moving in various narratives within the Bible, so did the soul have to be physicalized in order to craft an effective visionary experience. The crucial difference was that theologians could explain such descriptions of God as figures of speech, meant to aid humans in comprehending the utterly incomprehensible nature of the divine. The soul, on the other hand, was the very self, the core of human nature. If the soul could not be described and comprehended, that raised serious doubts about the purpose of theological study. In the case of formal treatises, authors faced an easier task because of the generalized nature of their subject; they could employ abstract and philosophical terminology to describe incorporeal souls in the plural. In the case of visions, the abstract was less of an option, since the agenda was often to depict familiar individuals and their status after death.
An incorporeal soul did not offer much potential when it came to the creative formation of a new visionary mode of writing.Footnote 35 For this reason, perhaps, Evodius's notion of an airy bodily form continued to find resonance among Latin writers in western Europe. Nevertheless, most Carolingian visionary authors seem to have been acutely aware of the doctrinal danger of suggesting that the soul might exit the body in a material form. Rather than depicting a view of the soul that catered to popular beliefs and stood in contrast to mainstream theology, ninth-century visionary authors hewed closely to arguments within contemporaneous treatises on the soul.Footnote 36 The correspondences between these two genres becomes sharper when one observes that the treatises written in the fifty years following Alcuin's On the Nature of the Soul did not, in fact, maintain a strictly Augustinian outlook, but rather, like the visionary authors, aimed to work in the niche between Augustine and Evodius.
Inspiration for the Journey
Two and a half centuries after Evodius's and Augustine's correspondence, a writer in western Gaul picked up many of Evodius's suggestions when he composed what may be the first stand-alone Latin visionary treatise of the Middle Ages. On 25 March 678/679, an ill monk named Barontus at the monastery of Longoretus had a vision, which one of his brothers later decided to set down in writing as a warning to sinners about the perils of the Day of Judgment.Footnote 37 As the monastic community was gathered around the sick monk, praying to God to “send his soul back into his body,” a battle for Barontus's soul was being waged between two demons and the Archangel Raphael.Footnote 38 The upshot of this battle, as Barontus relayed in his own words after his return, was that Raphael was able to carry Barontus off to Saint Peter in the heavens to be judged. Barontus's description makes clear that the crux of this drama was the peculiar sense of his soul separating from his body:
Extending his finger, Saint Raphael touched my throat, and in distress I at once felt my soul torn from my body. But I will report how small that soul was, as far as it was visible to me: it seemed to me to be similar in its tininess to a little chick when it exits from the egg. And likewise, that small [soul] carried with it a complete head, eyes, and the other limbs, sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. But it was not at all able to speak until it came to the trial and received a body made of air, similar to that which it left behind here.Footnote 39
The wealth of descriptive details employed in this short passage creates a graphic scene. Such techniques, we can assume, were chosen in order to persuade readers of the truth of Barontus's vision.
What we immediately perceive, however, is the difficulty that the author faced in communicating something as intangible as the soul; hence, the resort to similes. Before the soul takes on an airy body that resembles Barontus's normal body, it can be described only as having a size like a chick's, a detail that is not especially illuminating. What is clear is that the soul had some kind of physical form even before it received its airy body, or else Barontus could not have said anything about its initial size.Footnote 40 This small soul had, in fact, a head, although what this means is not apparent, apart from the information that the soul possessed the use of all five senses. We see here not only an implicit association between the soul and the head, but also Evodius's conviction that the soul after death must surely possess some of the five senses through which it governed the body during life.Footnote 41 In this regard, it is noteworthy that Barontus's corporeal body was unable to employ its senses or limbs in movement, speech, or sight while it lay on the bed, presumably because its animating soul was not present.Footnote 42 It is also suggestive that, when describing the departure of his soul from his body, Barontus's first-person narrative shifts to that of a (somewhat) impersonal observer: for only a few lines, the subject is “it” rather than “I.” It is as if the Latin reflects Barontus's uncertainty about where his identity lies; is it still in his body, or has it been transferred to his bodiless soul? In this hiatus, Barontus can only recognize his soul as his, but not him. Yet, he reassures his audience that, at such a crucial moment as the judging of the soul, it will possess a body of air. Though the contours of the airy body remain vague, what the author of the text emphasizes is that, in the intermediate afterlife, the soul will have a body, one that allows individual identity and appearance to be maintained.
The author of the Vision of Barontus may not have been consciously responding to Evodius's set of propositions, yet the parallels are striking. The correspondences between the concerns raised by Evodius at the turn of the fifth century and the graphic “answers” provided by the Vision of Barontus speak to a persistent current of unease in how the disembodiment of death was imagined. To be sure, the community in which Barontus lived was not the first to consider the means of the soul's departure. In his Dialogues from the late sixth century, Pope Gregory the Great attempted to address anxieties about the postmortem existence of the soul by describing examples of the departing souls of saints being seen as flames, doves, and light.Footnote 43 He also included a handful of stories about men who died, but then were quickly restored to life in order that they might recount their visitation of heaven and hell.Footnote 44 The Dialogues, as Matthew Dal Santo has demonstrated, was a contribution to a larger debate across the Mediterranean world about the orthodoxy of the cult of the saints and the efficacy of relics.Footnote 45 Gregory's work was frequently mentioned in Carolingian visionary texts and was instrumental in helping to shape its traditions, yet it did not answer many of the points raised by Evodius.Footnote 46
When Carolingian intellectuals began to compose their own accounts of journeys to the otherworld, the Vision of Barontus offered a possible model for envisioning both the course of that journey and the appearance of the soul.Footnote 47 It was apparently a popular text in the ninth century and was copied frequently as manuscript production increased sharply under Louis the Pious.Footnote 48 However, it was not the only influence on the new visionary genre. A Greek text from the fourth century that was translated into Latin as the Vision of Paul recounted the bodily ascent of the Apostle Paul into the heavens, where he toured heaven and hell with an angelic guide.Footnote 49 In his Histories from the late sixth century, Gregory of Tours included two short stories of monks who experienced visions of the afterlife.Footnote 50 The mid-seventh-century Life of Fursey, about the exploits of an Irish missionary monk, featured a long visionary sequence of Fursey's otherworldly encounters with demons, angels, and a terrifying wall of fire.Footnote 51 In his eighth-century Ecclesiastical History, Bede detailed the vision of a Northumbrian layman named Dryhthelm, who witnessed the fate of souls in a purgatorial vale of flame and snow.Footnote 52 And Boniface, the mid-eighth-century English missionary to Francia, offered a lengthy description of the otherworldly judgment of a monk of Wenlock monastery.Footnote 53
All of the above visions were well-known to the Carolingians. Monastic and episcopal libraries possessed copies of these earlier works, and many of them were directly or indirectly referenced in the composition of new visions over the course of the ninth century.Footnote 54 It seems probable that the interest in cultivating a visionary genre not only encouraged the preservation of older texts, but also may have resulted in the reworking of some of these texts. For example, the earliest manuscript witnesses to redactions of the Vision of Paul date to the early ninth century.Footnote 55 For the first time, groups of visionary texts came to comprise discrete units within manuscripts produced in Carolingian scriptoria. This is an indication that, by the ninth century, there was a clear sense that these constituted a recognizable genre.Footnote 56
Disgust Toward the Body
Despite the availability of these earlier works, Carolingian visionary writers for the most part seem to have employed them only tentatively as models. Several themes common to this emergent genre in the seventh and eighth centuries were, in fact, rejected by those who propelled the genre into its ninth-century flourishing. This was particularly true when it came to the mechanics of that crucial moment at which the visionary returned to the earthly realm in order to retell the sights and truths he had witnessed. Visionary narratives composed prior to the ninth century tended to depict the liberated soul expressing feelings of disgust and resentment toward the body. In Boniface's account of the vision of the monk of Wenlock, when the monk is told by his angelic guides that he must return to his body, he finds that:
His own body, while he was outside of it, repulsed him so very much that in all those visions he saw nothing so odious, nothing so contemptible, nothing so horrifically stinky (except the demons and the blazing fire) as his very own body. And his fellow monks, whom he saw showing such mercy in carrying out death rites for his corpse, likewise repulsed him because they were taking care of that hateful body.Footnote 57
The prospect of his soul having to reoccupy the space of the flesh, even if it is described as “his very own body” fills the monk of Wenlock with dread. Precisely what is so odious about the body is not stated, except for its terrible smell, and in his report, Boniface offers no further details. At the beginning of the vision, when the monk's soul first departs his body, the soul is said to be stripped all at once from the burden of the body (corporis gravido) and to suddenly see clearly those things that had previously been concealed and unknown.Footnote 58
Similarly, at the end of his tour of the afterlife, Bede's Dryhthelm expresses a reluctance to re-enter his body, preferring the fragrant smells and beautiful light of the paradisiacal meadow to which his guide has taken him.Footnote 59 In the Vision of Fursey, the monk experiences a profound moment of disconnection from his body in the moments leading up to re-entry. Situated up high on a roof, Fursey is unable to identify the appearance of his body and an angel must order him “to recognize and take back up his own proper body. Then he, fearing the cadaver as if it were unknown to him, did not want to draw near to that thing.”Footnote 60 The angel, however, reassures Fursey that his body is clean; it is no longer polluted by sickness or sin thanks to the purging fire that Fursey has met with in the otherworld. Indeed, the guide elaborates that Fursey will not feel any pain in reoccupying his flesh except for the burns marks that appear on his body where the fire touched his soul on its journey. Fursey's soul is then able to cross back into the body through an opening that appears in his chest.
Not one of the Carolingian visionary texts includes such a scene of aggrieved re-entry into the physical world. Like Wenlock and Fursey, many of the ninth-century visionaries were monks, yet despite their shared ascetic mentality there seems to have been no desire to imitate the models that the Insular ecclesiastics imparted to the Carolingians. Indeed, one of the only Carolingian accounts to include a re-entry description is the Vision of Charles the Fat from the late ninth century. Here, the Emperor Charles himself describes how “my very weary and frightened spirit was returned into my body” at the end of his trip to burning purgatorial valleys.Footnote 61 In this case, the soul's fearfulness is hardly attributed to the prospect of returning to the body; rather, it is the lack of a bodily shelter that seems to accentuate the soul's weakened state. Likewise, in the Life of Anskar, an account of the missionary's work in Scandinavia written in the early 870s by Bishop Rimbert of Hamburg-Bremen, Rimbert recounts at length a celestial vision that the holy monk experienced and that fed his zeal for martyrdom among the pagans. In relating this vision, Anskar purportedly proclaimed that it ended when “I returned to my body. In going and returning there was no effort or hindrance.”Footnote 62 In stark contrast to Wenlock and Fursey, then, Anskar did not suggest that he viewed the body as a burden or a polluted vessel, but merely as a particular mode of existence while on earth.Footnote 63
Techniques of Leaving and Returning
The Vision of Charles the Fat and Rimbert's account of Anskar's journey to the heavenly court are unusual among the visions extant from the ninth century because they explicitly indicate that their subjects spent time outside of their bodies. While he was attempting to sleep, Charles the Fat heard a voice instructing him, “Charles, your spirit will now exit from you for a sustained period of time.” Immediately, Charles was swept up in the spirit, with someone dressed in purest white raising him upward.Footnote 64 Anskar, meanwhile, experienced a nighttime vision of his own death in which he saw his soul leaving his body and “at once, it appeared in another, most beautiful kind of body, one free from all cares and aspects of mortality.”Footnote 65 We have already explored two seventh-century visions that, likewise, speak of the soul separating from the body and then returning to it at the end of the episode (Barontus and Fursey).Footnote 66 This seems to be the model that the Vision of Charles the Fat follows. Anskar's account is somewhat more problematic because it is initially framed as a vision of a future out-of-body experience, but it, too, includes verbs such as going (ire) and returning (redire) to the body.Footnote 67
Such verbs are exceedingly rare in Carolingian visionary literature. Instead, ninth-century authors relied on ambiguous language such as “being led” or “swept up in ecstasy” in order to signal the beginning of an otherworldly journey.Footnote 68 They avoided the suggestion that the soul could simply exit and enter the body on a whim one night. They also eschewed the notion that a body and soul whose ties had been definitively severed in death could then be reunited and the person returned to life. Thus, while the majority of pre-ninth-century visionary journeys described cases of resurrection, not a single Carolingian vision of the afterlife utilized this resurrection topos.Footnote 69
In Gregory of Tours's account of Saint Salvius, the monks had actually washed and dressed the dead body of the saint when the corpse suddenly sprang to life to report how angels had carried him to the court of heaven.Footnote 70 In the vision of the monk of Wenlock, Boniface is explicit that he had spoken with “that man who died and was revived.”Footnote 71 That man told him how his brothers were carrying out funeral rites on his body when he was forced to return into it. Similarly, Bede summarizes the experience of the layman Dryhthelm as that of “a man dead for some time returned to bodily life.”Footnote 72 Indeed, Dryhthelm so terrified those holding vigil around his corpse when he suddenly sat up that only his wife initially heard the report of his spiritual encounters (the others having fled in fear).Footnote 73 Despite its ubiquity, this kind of scene is entirely absent in the visionary writings that became increasingly popular after the 820s.Footnote 74 Ninth-century authors certainly embraced dramatic and detail-rich prose in order to underscore the significance of the otherworldly episode, yet they did not imitate the model of the resurrected visionary.
The texts produced in what Dutton calls the “dream factory” of Reichenau were the first Carolingian experiments in the visionary mode, and they evince the most hesitation in using language that implies the detachment of soul from body. The two narratives of Wetti's frightful experience — the first composed by Heito, former abbot of Reichenau, the second by Walafrid Strabo, a monk at Reichenau — both emphasize that Wetti is not asleep when his first vision occurs.Footnote 75 That fateful night, “having arranged his limbs on the bed, and with his eyes only just closed and not yet relaxed in sleep (necdum in somnum), as he reported, an evil spirit arrived.”Footnote 76 Nevertheless, both Heito and Walafrid state unequivocally that Wetti “wakes up” (expergefactus and evigilat) at the conclusion of the first of the two visions that occur over the course of the night.Footnote 77
In Heito's and Walafrid's retelling of Wetti's second visionary encounter, the way in which the monk's sensory experience shifts from the concrete cloister of Reichenau to the realm of the dead is purposefully vague. While Wetti was recovering in bed from his first vision, Walafrid states simply that an angel appeared and “raising up the invalid, led him along a delightful path.”Footnote 78 This path takes the monk through various landscapes of the afterworld — a mountain encircled with a fiery river, a wooden fort filled with smoke, a row of shining mansions — until the moment when Wetti awakens in his bed to the rooster's crow. For Heito, the second vision begins when Wetti had finally drifted off to sleep: at that point, the angel appeared and “led him along a bright path of great delight.”Footnote 79 As in Walafrid's version, the vivid pastoral and agricultural sites witnessed by Wetti raise the possibility that the angel has taken Wetti's soul on a spatial journey, while his body alone stayed in the monastery.Footnote 80 The terms “body” and “soul” are never used, however, in stark contrast to earlier visionary texts.
This deliberately ambiguous model was imitated by contemporaries.Footnote 81 The Vision of Rotchar, which likely constituted a response to the Vision of Wetti and may have been composed at Reichenau or Reims, follows many of the inventions of Heito's text.Footnote 82 The monk Rotchar was lying in the infirmary on account of an illness, “slumped in sleep” (sopore depressus), when an angel suddenly appeared and “saying nothing to him, the angel began to proceed along a path of delight.” Rotchar, “led by intense love,” followed him and likewise received a tour of various abodes of the afterworld.Footnote 83
The invocation of sleep in both Heito's Vision of Wetti and the Vision of Rotchar points toward the framing of the protagonist's experience as a dream rather than an out-of-body encounter.Footnote 84 And yet, there are also clear hints that something more than a dream is being suggested.Footnote 85 A dream would not necessarily require an angelic guide; indeed, such guides had previously facilitated otherworldly journeys in cases where the visionary's soul did exit the body (Barontus, Fursey, Dryhthelm, Wenlock, and Salvius).Footnote 86 In the example of the resurrected visionary Dryhthelm, Bede had used the language of an angel “leading” (ducere) the dead man to a valley of dead souls, language that Heito, Walafrid, and the author of the Vision of Rotchar replicated. Ultimately, the dozy state of sleep (or not-quite-sleep in Walafrid's text) and a narrative style that quickly glanced over the techniques of the “vision” served to obscure whether the event was to be understood as a spiritual experience of the stationary soul or a movement of the soul out of the body by means of heavenly assistance.
That Carolingian readers of the Vision of Wetti themselves interpreted the event differently, along a spectrum from dream to soul-journey, is evinced in the manner in which they adapted and borrowed from Heito's original text. An entry in the Annals of Fulda from the year 874, for example, repeated specific phrases in describing a vision that Louis the German had of his father Louis the Pious suffering torments in the afterlife and begging for assistance.Footnote 87 In this case, the author of the annals definitively pronounced the vision as something that occurred during Louis's dreams and did not reference an angelic guide as part of the episode.Footnote 88
By contrast, a visionary treatise produced at Reims, which likewise quoted Heito's text, veered much closer to an out-of-body account than a dream. In 877 (approximately fifty years after the Vision of Wetti), Hincmar, archbishop of Reims, circulated a letter detailing the experiences of one Bernold, a layman in his parish who had witnessed the suffering of dead counts and bishops as well as the recently deceased Emperor Charles the Bald in another world.Footnote 89 According to Hincmar, Bernold recounted in his own words what had happened while he was lying in bed near the point of death: “I was led (ductus) from this world to another world and came to a certain place.”Footnote 90 There, he encountered the souls of many dead bishops, some of whom he recognized; one of these episcopal interlocuters, Ebbo of Reims, implored the layman's aid in securing alms and prayers for his soul from those still living. “Because permission to return to your body will be granted,” as the bishop declared to Bernold, that meant that he would be able to serve as an effective intermediary between the two realms of existence.Footnote 91 And, indeed, throughout the relatively long string of visionary episodes, Bernold seems to engage in an unusual sequence of encounters with men suffering punishments, interactions with men still living, and then concluding conversations with the same men released from their purgatorial punishments.Footnote 92 In a similar manner to Ebbo, another of these interlocuters reminds Bernold that “you will go from this world to the body,” and thus, he should use the remaining years of his life to perform good works and give alms so as to ensure that when he returns to the afterlife he warrants “a good mansion.”Footnote 93
Such direct pronouncements by those within the vision function as signifiers that Bernold's soul has traveled out of his body to a place of the dead. Unlike in the case of Louis the German, the narrative veers sharply away from the notion that this constitutes a dream. And yet, the landscape of Bernold's vision, and the temporal sequence of his encounters, is far more dream-like than that experienced by Wetti, Rotchar, or Louis. Bernold is “led” into the vision and at another point is explicitly given a ductor to guide him, but this figure is not otherwise identified in angelic terms. Instead of moving along a path through concrete natural features, Bernold flits between a series of undefined “places” (inde veni ad quendam locum), marked primarily by those whom he meets there.Footnote 94 In each episode, he converses first with individuals who are dead and then with those living, without any explanation of how he is able to move between the two realms.Footnote 95 The effect is a surreal chain of conversations, which seem to occur in a timeless, “in-between” space. Thus, although Hincmar explicitly compares Bernold's story to that of Dryhthelm, Fursey, Wenlock, and Wetti, it comes across as much less a journey to another place when compared to those travels carried out by his predecessors. While Hincmar certainly gestured to an out-of-body encounter in crafting this text, he seems to have made a conscious choice not to imitate seventh- and eighth-century English models in which the visionary was someone who died and was then resurrected.
Similarly, the Vision of Bernold made no use of another model of visionary encounter that was employed by multiple authors across the Carolingian realm from the later 820s onward. This model surfaces first in the Vision of the Poor Woman of Laon, a text that has been associated with the same community at Reichenau from which Wetti's story emerged.Footnote 96 It set a different course to that exemplified by the sick monk, however, in not locating the vision within a bedroom or in proximity to a state of sleep. Instead, it opens by describing how a lowly woman was “swept up in ecstasy” (in extasi rapta) when “a certain man dressed in the habit of a monk led her, as she herself reported, to where she could perceive the rest of the saints and the punishment of sinners.”Footnote 97 As in other contemporaneous visions, the woman walks through a series of vignettes, seeing, hearing, and even conversing with a number of dead souls whom she recognizes. There is no moment of waking or return back to the body, but rather the narrative simply shifts back to the temporal world. Similar vocabulary can be found in a vision ascribed to Saint Eucher, the eighth-century bishop of Orléans, in a synodic letter composed by Hincmar of Reims and sent to Louis the German in 858.Footnote 98 Eucher was “swept up” (raptus) while he was at prayer. Here, it is explicitly described as “swept up to another world” from which “he was returned to himself” after he had witnessed the suffering of Louis's great-great-grandfather, Charles Martel, with the help of his angelic guide (ductor).Footnote 99
This usage of raptus would likely have summoned to mind an incident relayed by the Apostle Paul about a man “swept up” (raptus) into the third heaven, “whether in the body or out of the body, I do not know.”Footnote 100 The unnamed man was generally assumed to be Paul himself, but there was little consensus on how to understand this rapture among late antique and early medieval theologians. Augustine interpreted Paul's experience as a face-to-face vision of God, possible only through the highest form of cognition, an intellectual perception of God's incorporeal substance. Paul entered a state of ecstasy in which his soul was able to ascend and withdraw from the senses of the body to such an extent that he witnessed God's being, an impossible state for most mortals.Footnote 101 Indeed, Gregory the Great deemed it impossible for anyone still in the body to witness the divine essence and described Paul's rapture as a sighting of Paradise, not a vision of God.Footnote 102 For Gregory, while the soul was attached to the earthly body and distracted by its concerns, any contemplation of God was always limited and momentary.Footnote 103
Augustine's and Gregory's discussions emphasized raptus as a state of removal (or even complete detachment) of the soul from the body, a movement of the mind toward God that did not involve any physical movement.Footnote 104 Not all readings of Paul's statement agreed, however. The passage in Corinthians also formed a starting point for the abovementioned Greek text known as the Apocalypse of Paul, rendered into Latin at some point between the fourth and sixth centuries as the Vision of Paul. The earliest extant manuscript of this Latin version describes how Paul, “while [he] was in the body in which [he] was swept up (raptus) to the third heaven,” was led by an angel above the firmament of the earth and saw a river flowing with milk and honey, the city of Christ, and the Paradise of Adam and Eve, as well as the abyss of sinners and their various punishments.Footnote 105 Here, Paul's movements through the cosmos are clearly defined as embodied, and the landscapes and souls he witnesses (just as in the Vision of Wetti) are depicted in material terms.Footnote 106
Although the Vision of Paul was known to several ninth-century authors of visionary literature, no author employing the term raptus states explicitly that the visionary was “swept up in the body” like the Apostle.Footnote 107 This may be suggested in the vision of the poor woman, but it is definitively not the case in the Vision of Charles the Fat, where Charles is described as “swept up in the spirit” (raptus in spiritu) when his soul exits his body.Footnote 108 Similarly, in his Book of Revelations from the early 850s, the suffragan bishop Audradus Modicus recalled his sight of the heavenly court (with Jesus, Mary, and the martyrs).Footnote 109 He defined this as occurring when “the spirit [of God] swept him up before the Lord.”Footnote 110 He was also able to make true predictions about the future when, as he states, “a withdrawal of the mind came upon me and the spirit of the Lord swept me up into the heavens.”Footnote 111 More than any other Carolingian visionary text, Audradus's presentation of the mechanics of his otherworldly encounter seems to resemble that of Paul as interpreted by Augustine and Gregory.Footnote 112
Thus, with the exception of Charles the Fat, one cannot conclude that any Carolingian visionary underwent a type of raptus that involved, unambiguously, the separation of soul and body.Footnote 113 Instead, raptus appears to be employed primarily in order to designate a kind of movement out of the self that does not actually comprise severing the bonds with the body and leaving it behind. In his treatise on the nature of the soul from 800, Alcuin had defined a state of the soul in which, “if it eagerly desires to contemplate God or itself or another spiritual matter, it withdraws itself from the senses of the body lest they cause an impediment to it while examining spiritual matters. Indeed, often it will be affected to such an extent by a particular thought that, although it holds the eyes open, it does not see what is before it nor comprehend a voice speaking nor sense a body touching it.”Footnote 114 While the visions under discussion involve a journey to the afterlife and not, for the most part, personal encounters with God, the process and condition Alcuin describes seems like a form of internal spiritual contemplation (extasis) that the poor woman, Eucher, and Audradus may have experienced.Footnote 115 Works relatively contemporaneous to the Vision of the Poor Woman likewise employ the term extasis to indicate a type of paralysis, similar to a deep sleep, in which the individual appears to be present in the body, but in reality is witnessing events “in another place.”Footnote 116
Thus, whether in the more dream-like model advanced in the Vision of Wetti or in the rapture-based model of the Vision of the Poor Woman, Carolingian visionary writings steered clear of invoking the separation of body and soul in journeys to the afterlife. This lasted until the 870s, when such hesitancy seems to have faded, and both Charles the Fat and the missionary Anskar became the subject of visions that marked a change in discourse. Rimbert's account of Anskar's experience was the only Carolingian visionary text that came close to adopting the imagery of the Vision of Barontus.Footnote 117 Just like the seventh-century monk, Anskar was able to see his own soul leaving his body and assuming another partner, a more beautiful and immortal kind of body.Footnote 118
The View from Theological Treatises
Carolingian visionary texts were intended to be dramatic, their sketch of postmortem punishments terrifyingly real; readers were meant to be persuaded of both the truth of the vision and the intense need to repent. So why did the ninth-century “birth” of this genre witness a stifling, not intensification, of the narrative devoted to the journey of the visionary? Answering that question demands that we consider the material conditions that underpinned a sighting of the afterlife. The most narrative potential lay in the out-of-body experience because that allowed for an uninterrupted first-person description as well as a clear point of transition between the visible world of the living and the unseen world of the angels, demons, and dead. Yet, what we see in the ninth century is a new reluctance to suggest that the bonds holding the body and soul together could be so easily broken as to allow for the soul to leave and then re-enter its bodily home. These were bonds that were severed only at death, when the soul deserted its home definitively.
In his treatise for Charlemagne's cousin from 800, Alcuin was adamant that the soul did not possess “the power of exiting from the flesh and returning again into it, but by his will who made it and sent it into the flesh.”Footnote 119 The soul was the crucial link between God and the body, endowing the flesh with life and governing it by means of a divinely imprinted rationality. Like God, the soul was incorporeal and invisible but unlike that superior to it, it was “contained” (circumscriptus) within the fleshy members: while the soul was fully present in every part of the body, God was “everywhere present and everywhere whole” (ubique praesens ubique tota) throughout the entire cosmos.Footnote 120 Similarly, Alcuin emphasized, although the soul was able to contemplate matters and places far from the body, it did not “depart from its seat [the body] in order to consider something,” but rather, whenever it departed its home, the body, it proceeded directly to the judgment of God and then entered a fitting waiting place for the last days and its reunion with the flesh.Footnote 121
That the bond uniting body and soul underwent a profound severing in death was not in doubt, but how precisely the soul was affixed to the body during life remained a long-standing philosophical conundrum that seems to have particularly engaged ninth-century intellectuals. The problem centered on materiality: if the soul were absolutely incorporeal, then logically it could not be localized in a specific space or delimited by physical boundaries. Alcuin largely remained silent on this conundrum, but his student Candidus Wizo tackled the issue head-on, outlining a kind of spectrum of incorporeality, in which only God was truly incorporeal. The soul, by contrast, was “called incorporeal,” but was “in a certain way corporeal” when compared to God and could thus be constrained within the material world.Footnote 122
With language such as this, Carolingian writers on the soul evince a continual, if veiled, doublespeak on the theological point of Neoplatonic incorporeality so important to Church Fathers like Augustine. It is true that all of the ninth-century authors of theological treatises on the soul state categorically that the soul is an incorporeal, indivisible substance. However, most follow this with declarations that significantly undermine a belief in true incorporeality. In his mid-ninth-century treatise, Hincmar of Reims devoted a chapter to defending the soul's incorporeality only to end said chapter by announcing that, although the soul is not a body, it “is believed to possess a corporeal likeness.”Footnote 123 Similarly, Hincmar's contemporaneous adversary, Gottschalk of Orbais, undercut the tenets of strict immateriality with his argument that every soul originated when God cleaved it from the souls of its parents at the same moment that the body came into being from the seeds of the conjugal union (a scenario that implied souls were divisible in a manner comparable to physical matter).Footnote 124 A few years later, the famed exegete Hrabanus Maurus asserted that the soul was incorporeal, and thus not delimited by lines or forms, but then proceeded to explain that it “did not preside equally in all the members” of the body, but took as its principal seat the head, due to its lofty position and spherical shape. In other words, the soul could be located within a defined space.Footnote 125 In this way, theological texts relied on a style of ambiguity, similar to that which I have suggested underpinned contemporaneous visionary literature.
One of the only Carolingian thinkers to adhere to an uncompromising incorporeal definition of the soul was Ratramnus of Corbie, who, in a treatise likely addressed to the court of Charles the Bald around 850, argued that the soul was restrained to the body only by the characteristics of its own nature.Footnote 126 Whereas Alcuin had defined the soul as “circumscribed by the individual members of its body,” Ratramnus maintained that a truly incorporeal entity could neither be localized nor circumscribed, and thus the soul was “contained by no limit of the body.”Footnote 127 However, his was evidently a minority opinion. All other Carolingian intellectuals who wrote on the nature of the soul resisted a formulation that made the connections between body and spirit seem contingent and nebulous. Indeed, Hincmar's treatise, which was composed under similar circumstances to Ratramnus's, suggests that the soul's containment within the body was an issue of particular concern to the Carolingian elite at Charles the Bald's court in the middle of the ninth century. This work was dedicated to Charles the Bald, and Hincmar states that it was prompted by the circulation of a short booklet addressing different aspects of the soul.Footnote 128 In stark contrast to Ratramnus, Hincmar declared that the soul could be called localized (localis) because it clung to the body, and he assembled a long collection of scriptural and patristic quotations to prove that “although it is a spirit, the soul is contained by the body in a miraculous and ineffable way.”Footnote 129 Indeed, over the course of answering “whether the soul is held spatially in the body” (utrum anima localiter teneatur in corpore), the bishop's tone evinced a mounting urgency, such that by the end of the section he seemed to be bellowing in a frenzy: “Look how many and what types of proofs (not mere arguments) show us that souls are clothed by, joined with, and bound to bodies. It seems dangerous to us to oppose their authority.”Footnote 130 If anyone does not believe these proofs, Hincmar continued, that person should be banished from the communion of the faithful. That the soul's adherence to the body was a sore point, at least for the bishop of Reims, is hard to miss.
Like Alcuin had done, Hincmar made clear that, while the soul can detach itself and remove itself from the bodily senses, as occurs in sleep, or can be led away through a departure of the mind, as occurs in ecstasy, it is only totally separated from the body in death.Footnote 131 Along similar lines, the authors of ninth-century visions (Hincmar among them) declined to endorse a model of temporary death followed by resurrection and thus contributed to the belief that death was a strict point of no-return. There was no Carolingian version of a Saint Salvius or monk of Wenlock. Furthermore, when at death the soul did exit the corpse, it did so on its own and not within another, alternative body, Hincmar pointed out, citing Augustine's aforementioned letter to Evodius.Footnote 132 This, then, invalidated the scenario depicted by the Vision of Barontus, although that text was evidently read and enjoyed by the Carolingian elite. In fact, Hincmar almost certainly was closely familiar with Barontus's narrative and deemed the text edifying for Charles the Bald, but that makes his decision not to follow its model in the composition of the Vision of Bernold all the more striking.Footnote 133 For Hincmar and most of the other visionary authors, the suggestion of the soul coming and going from the body threatened the very coherence of the individual, the belief that each soul was divinely matched to its own proper body. The soul originated at the same time that the physical body came into being, and it possessed no other body than that flesh.Footnote 134 This was a relationship broken only temporarily for the intermediate afterlife, the time between one person's death and the communal Last Judgment.
And yet, this did not mean that the bonds between body and soul could not be “loosened” during life on earth, or so the authors of ninth-century visions seem to imply.Footnote 135 A clear motif that emerges within this budding genre is the prominent role of illness. Like Barontus and Fursey, who were dreadfully sick before experiencing their visions, Wetti had that nasty turn after taking a draught; Rotchar, similarly, was lying in the monastic infirmary on account on sickness when his vision occurred; and Bernold fared even worse, for he was lying “as if dead” (velut exanimis), such that those standing by his bed could scarcely sense his breath going in and out, when he had his encounter.Footnote 136 While Carolingian authors jettisoned other elements of the visionary mode they had inherited, they retained with notable consistency the occurrence of illness as a specific stage leading up to the visionary event.Footnote 137 In order for the truthfulness of the vision to remain without doubt, authors had to be clear that this was no mere dream. There existed a real divide between this world in the body and the next world of the spirit, and readers needed to be reassured that the visionary had entered this alternate realm. One signpost for this transition was the assistance of an angelic guide; the other was illness.
Drawing attention to differing levels of skepticism toward dreams among early medieval English, Spanish, and Frankish societies, Jesse Keskiaho has argued that Carolingian visionary texts generally assumed dreams to hold the same truth-value as visions.Footnote 138 As proof, Keskiaho points to the Reichenau textual community, which, in his reading, unproblematically framed experiences like Wetti's as dreams.Footnote 139 If we are to accept Wetti's journey as a dream, however, we should ask why a dream would require a trigger like extreme sickness. Crucially, Wetti is still alive during the visionary incident, and when he awakes, the brothers check for signs of death on his person, but find no paleness in the face, no emaciation, no stiffness in his limbs, no depletion in his veins and reassure him that he will live into the future.Footnote 140 Their actions evince the belief that the body can be read for signs of the dissolution of the soul-body union. And, though they fail to see such signs, the story ends with Wetti's death. It is not sleep but the proximity of death that stimulates the titular character's otherworldly travels; thus, though dream-like, Wetti's vision is no dream.Footnote 141
In his On the Nature of the Soul, Alcuin treated sickness as a breakdown in the mechanisms by which the soul fulfilled its function to govern the body. When the materials of the body were disordered, the soul did not have the tools at its disposal to administer its home properly; this caused it pain, and, if the disorder could not be rectified, it broke the soul's attachment to the flesh.Footnote 142 Similarly, Hrabanus noted that when a person experienced a significant loss of blood, the soul “is seen to desert the little home of the body,” although, as a spiritual substance, in no way does it “make an end with that home.”Footnote 143 Extreme illness or injury, then, was understood as an event that began to loosen the bonds tying the soul to the body. Just so, the attention devoted to Wetti's illness and the proximity of his death was meant to underscore to a Carolingian reader the extent to which the relaxation of the ties binding the soul to the body was conducive to a true visionary encounter.
In conclusion, although this study has focused primarily on visionary texts, a brief comparison of these with contemporaneous theological treatises points strongly to the need not to draw overly strict boundaries between the two genres. There has been a tendency to cast early medieval visions as windows onto common belief, able to exploit, in some fashion, a reservoir of folklore about the soul that resisted the high theology of Carolingian reformers.Footnote 144 Yet, authors of the visionary texts were not blissfully unaware of centuries of Christian thought about the nature of the soul, nor were they ignorant of the role they played in crafting an understanding of identity.Footnote 145 After all, not only did individuals such as Hincmar author both visionary texts and a theological treatise on the soul, but also the audiences for both genres were broadly the same: monastic houses and royal and ecclesiastical members of the court. To suggest that visionary narratives embraced an embodied notion of the soul and afterlife, while doctrinal treatises adhered to a patristic principle of incorporeality is to ignore the middle ground that both sets of authors, for the most part, attempted to fashion.
One genre was not inevitably more intellectual than the other, but rather, each was subject to different concerns and constraints, given the influence of earlier models. The theological texts sought to delimit a patristic tradition insistent on incorporeality, even though they did so subtly and without directly challenging the line of thought we have traced here back to Augustine's dialogue with Evodius. Consequently, for all their efforts to define and clarify the nature of the soul (after a three-hundred-year hiatus of a Latin De anima tradition), these Carolingian works ultimately offered little guidance in terms of how to speak about the soul as a concrete entity, one capable of existing and perceiving outside of the body. It follows naturally, then, that the authors of visionary narratives displayed a great deal more reticence in presenting what we might cheekily call a “fully fleshed out” description of the soul when compared to their Merovingian predecessors. Even as an author like Rimbert drew vivid scenes of a soul standing before the heavenly court, he vigorously reminded his peers that “there was nothing corporeal there, but all of them were incorporeal, although they possessed the form of bodies and in this way were indescribable.”Footnote 146 Here was an account that, although it bore many parallels to the Vision of Barontus, was by no means endorsing its perspective on the operations of souls and bodies.
Uncertainty regarding the soul's appearance and existence after death was in no way limited to the ninth century, but for a period that contributed significantly to the development of a medieval visionary tradition, the reticence of Carolingian authors stands out. The lively outpouring of literary activity in crafting scenes of the afterlife did not, it would seem, override or ignore concerns about upholding orthodox teachings, even if the very boundaries of orthodoxy were not entirely clear when it came to the soul's postmortem existence. Given how few visionary texts survive from before the ninth century, when discussing the genre, it is tempting to speak in terms of processes of accretion and teleological development. However, alongside examples of imitation and replication, conscious distancing and deviation marked the relationship between early Carolingian visions and those that came previously. Similarly, even among Carolingian thinkers, there was notable experimentation with different concepts, and, by the 870s, there are suggestive hints that visionary conventions were changing.Footnote 147 None of this is particularly surprising, given that penitential practices for the dead were not a stable system, but were often regional developments that started to come into sharper focus in the course of the Carolingian reforms. Nevertheless, attention to the silences and ambiguities in ninth-century visionary narratives illuminates one more crack in the enduring construction of the early Middle Ages as a period lacking in creative problem-solvers, especially when intellectuals, authors, and story tellers were grappling with matters of theological import.
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