A.N. Wilson

Early Christian alms race

In a review of Peter Brown’s The Ransom of the Soul A.N. Wilson finds that the afterlife of the early Christians was largely influenced by money

Peter Brown’s explorations of the mindsets of late antiquity have been educating us for nearly half a century, ever since his great life of St Augustine in 1967. His latest book, relatively short in volume but very wide in scope, explores Christian attitudes to the afterlife, from the time of Cyprian of Carthage (martyred in 258) to that of Julian, Bishop of Toledo in the late seventh century.

Julian put together an anthology called the Prognosticon Futuri Saeculi. He viewed his book as a compilation of the shared wisdom of Christianity. What in fact he demonstrated, in this ‘futurology of the Christian soul’ as Brown calls it, was the extreme variety of viewpoints over the previous 400-odd years. One would expect a difference over nearly half a millennium. We do not think as the Elizabethans did and by ‘around the year 650’, as Brown rather poignantly demonstrates, ‘the ancient world truly died in western Europe’.

Gregory of Tours, the first historian of western, barbarian Europe (he became bishop of Tours in 573) had a quarrel with one of his priests. The priest believed that ordinary people did not have everlasting life. The damned were damned. The saints and superheroes became stars in the Milky Way. Marcus Aurelius (121–180) had had similar views, while deploring the Christians as suicidal exhibitionists. Tertullian (160–240), who was Marcus Aurelius’s contemporary, thought that the Christians slept in silence until the Last Judgment: they were having a nice rest, a refrigerium interim, before they awoke, either to damnation or to glory. Tertullian regarded it as ‘trivial’ to believe in the immortality of the soul, and hated the Platonism which was creeping into the church’s thinking.

So, there was a huge gap between St Matthew’s Gospel — which depicted Christ simply sending the sheep to heaven and the goats to hell in one moment of judgment — and the later, more complicated thoughts of the church.

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