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Discovering Universal Salvation

Little is more exciting to a medievalist than the discovery of a lost text preserved in a forgotten codex in some neglected archive. Or, in some cases, the text is right under our nose: In 1983, the great Syriac scholar Sebastian Brock came across an unknown work of Isaac of Nineveh in a manuscript at Oxford’s Bodleian library. Isaac was a monk who lived in Qatar and Mesopotamia during the seventh century (the first century of Islamic rule). In the Bodleian text, Isaac weighed in on a central topic of medieval thought: What happens after we die?

For many Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the premodern Islamic world, the answer to this question was similar, at least in its basic outlines. After an intermediate period in which souls sleep or have a foretaste of their future state, God will raise the dead and pass judgment on every person who has ever lived. Some will suffer eternal punishment, while others experience eternal joy. Poets, preachers, and artists across the medieval world delighted in imagining the exquisite pleasures of paradise and the equally exquisite pains of hell.

Virgil shows Dante the suffering of the simoniacs (15th c.).

As Brock discovered, Isaac rejected the idea of eternal punishment and argued instead for universal salvation. God, he wrote, punishes as a father does, to teach and correct. Punishment in hell is therefore temporary, and God will have mercy on all people. Even the Devil will be saved![1]

Arabic Icon of Isaac of Nineveh.

As I became more interested in Isaac’s views, I found that Brock’s discovery was (as is so often the case) a re-discovery. Around 1100 years earlier, a Christian in ninth-century Iraq named Ḥanūn b. Yūḥannā b. al-Ṣalt went hunting for Isaac’s books. He would later describe his quest in an Arabic paraphrase of Isaac’s writings. As Ḥanūn tells it, he was consumed with questions raised by his study of the Bible: Does God really grow angry? Do temporal sins deserve eternal punishment? Or does God have mercy on all people?

Ḥanūn asked these questions to anyone who would listen: “They gave me answers,” he wrote, “but their answers did not satisfy me!” Eventually, a monk suggested that Ḥanūn’s views resembled those of Isaac of Nineveh. Ḥanūn immediately rushed off in search of Isaac’s books, not stopping until he came to a monastery in the city of al-Anbār. Al-Anbār lay in central Iraq (near modern-day Fallujah), a region dotted with Christian monasteries.

Syriac Orthodox monastery of Mor Mattai, near Mosul, Iraq.

There, at last, Ḥanūn discovered Isaac’s teaching that the punishments of hell will end and all people will be saved.[2]

When I first read Ḥanūn’s account of Isaac’s views, I was surprised to find how much of it is shaped by the words of the Qur’an, sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, and other Islamic texts.[3] As I read further, I realized that the ways in which Ḥanūn wrote about God and salvation reflected broader debates in ‘Abbasid Iraq.

My research at the Medieval Institute examines these debates. They reveal a shared Jewish, Christian, and Islamic conversation about salvation and the related topics of divine mercy, justice, and punishment. Jewish, Christian, and Muslim authors posed the same questions (“Does God punish to deter evil?” “Is divine mercy universal or particular?”) and often answered them in similar terms. Their discussions probed the limits of deeply held religious convictions and were enlivened by colorful metaphors: the condemned delight in hell, as an early Muslim thinker put it, “like vinegar worms in vinegar.”[4] Universal salvation was a minority position in the medieval Islamic world, but the questions and debates surrounding it formed an important part of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic thought and of interreligious exchange.

Discovering Universal Salvation, Part 2:

Entrance to the Egyptian National Library (Dār al-Kutub al-Miṣriyya).

In 1995, Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Simharī discovered a manuscript in the Egyptian National Library containing the full version of a treatise on universal salvation by Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), a highly influential scholar from medieval Syria.[5] The publication of this text has helped spur a surge of interest in Islamic views of universal salvation, including in the writings of towering figures such as Ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240) and Mulla Ṣadra (d. 1640).[6]

But how did these authors develop their ideas? One aim of my research is to show how the seeds of Islamic universalism developed in the earlier debates of the Umayyad and ‘Abbasid eras. This does not, of course, take away from the creativity of later thinkers, but it will help us understand more precisely how these thinkers wove together elements from earlier Islamic tradition in new ways that shaped the trajectory of Islamic thought on salvation.

The wonderful resources and community of the Medieval Institute have been a tremendous boon as I examine these Jewish, Christian, and Islamic conversations and the vibrant intellectual culture that fostered them.

John Zaleski
A. W. Mellon Junior Faculty Fellow
Medieval Institute
University of Notre Dame

[1] Sebastian P. Brock (ed. and trans.), Isaac of Nineveh (Isaac the Syrian). ‘The Second Part’, Chapters IV-XLI, CSCO 554/5, Syr. 224/5 (Leuven: Peeters, 1995), esp. 148–71 (Syriac) / 160–82 (English).

[2] Ḥanūn’s account is edited in Paul Sbath, Traités religieux, philosophiques et moraux, extraits des oeuvres d’Isaac de Ninive (VIIe siècle) par Ibn As-Salt (IXe siècle) (Cairo: N.G. Thamaz, 1934).

[3] On this, see Alexander Treiger, “Mutual Influences and Borrowings,” in Routledge Handbook on Christian-Muslim Relations, ed. David Thomas (London: Routledge, 2018), 196–97.

[4] Attributed to Abū Ismāʿīl al-Biṭṭīkhī, in, e.g. al-Ashʿarī, Maqālāt al-islāmiyyīn, ed. Helmut Ritter, 3 vols. (Istanbul: Maṭbaʿat al-dawla, 1929–1933), 2:475. See also al-Jāḥiẓ, Kitāb al-Ḥayawān, ed. ʿAbd al-Salām b. Muḥammad Hārūn, 7 vols. (Beirut: Dār al-Kitāb al-ʻArabī, 1969), 3:396.

[5] Ibn Taymiyya, Al-Radd ʿalā man qāla bi-fanāʾ al-janna wa-l-nār, ed. Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Simharī (Riyadh: Dār al-Balansiyya, 1415/1995).

[6] See especially Mohammad Hassan Khalil, Islam and the Fate of Others (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

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Connecting with the Public through Medieval Animals

As medievalists and scholars who spend our days reading, researching, and teaching the Middle Ages, it is easy to take for granted the vibrancy, intrigue, and importance of the period. But how can we help audiences outside the academy connect to people and cultures so distant from themselves? My own work offers me a readymade solution: animals. For several years, including in my current position as the Public Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at Notre Dame’s Medieval Institute, I have had the privilege of speaking to many different groups of children and adults across multiple countries about the Middle Ages and its animals. It is always such a great joy to introduce them to the weird and wonderful world of medieval animal riddles and poetry, facts from bestiaries and other encyclopedias, and of course manuscript illuminations.

I usually start these talks with a series of strange animal illustrations from medieval manuscripts, asking the audience simply to guess what the animals are. A recent event for kids at the St Joe County Public Library thus began with these four pictures and more:

Manuscript illuminations from: Cambridge, Corpus Christi College Parker Library, MS 053, fol. 193v (CC BY-NC 4.0); Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cod. gall. 16, fol. 17r; British Library, Royal MS 2 B VII, fol. 102v; Bibliothèque Municipale de Douai, Ms. 711, fol. 11v (CC BY-NC 3.0).

Then comes the reveal that all of the wildly different illustrations are meant to be the same animal: a crocodile. What follows are usually cries of incredulity and laughter over how inaccurate all the images are. They’re not all terrible, of course, and I do make it clear that I choose the silliest ones available.

The significant question, then, is why there are so many bad medieval animals out there. With animals like crocodiles, one straightforward answer is that the illustrators had never seen the creatures in real life, but were drawing them based on writings from other parts of the globe. This becomes a good opportunity to talk about the interconnectedness of the medieval world — an animal from the Nile gets written about by a bishop in Seville, whose words inspire a drawing in Peterborough. This can also lead to conversations about the nature of the writers and illustrators themselves, often monks and other holy men and women who are testament to the importance of medieval religious houses as centers of science and learning, thus challenging a popularly held stereotype about the “Dark Ages”.

With children (and their grown ups), there’s a silly drawing game I like to play to put them in the shoes of these medieval illustrators — how good can they be at drawing an animal they have never seen before? This can be done by making up an entirely new beast, but I prefer to defamiliarize an animal that the children already know, asking them to draw it one feature at a time, as with this example with information drawn from medieval accounts:

  1. The animal is reddish in colour.
  2. It has four feet and legs like those of a bull or a deer.
  3. Its body is short at the back and tall at the front so it looks like it is always sitting down.
  4. It has a long neck like a horse.
  5. It has a head like a camel.
  6. It is covered in white spots like a leopard.

By the time the kids figure out that they are drawing a giraffe, the results are usually already hilariously wonky, not far from the illustrations they were laughing at a few minutes ago!

Left: Activity sheets from the St Joe County Public Library event. Right: Manuscript illumination from British Library, Additional MS 11390, fol. 22v.

When giving these talks in the UK, often to school groups, I would generally begin with a different animal that they would be fairly familiar with, the badger. As with crocodiles, medieval illustrations of badgers could be ridiculously unrecognizable, as evident in the two images below.

Manuscript illuminations from: Cambridge University Library, Kk.4.25, fol. 74v (CC BY-NC 4.0); University of Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Bodl. 130, fol. 85r (CC BY-NC 4.0).

Unlike crocodiles and giraffes, however, medieval Europeans should have been more familiar with badgers; literary, archaeological, and place-name evidence suggests that the animal was a common feature of the British landscape. What excuse, then, could medieval illustrators have in this case? In some instances, there was a method to their madness. According to the Third-Family Bestiary in the above Cambridge manuscript, the badger is called melo in Latin either because of its fondness for honey (mel) or because it is rotundissimo like a melon (melo). It’s safe to say that this particular illustrator was inspired by the notion of roundness.

The Cambridge illustration also to me recalls Thomas of Cantimpré, the thirteenth-century Flemish Dominican friar and preacher who in his natural encyclopedia, De natura rerum, wrote that the fatness of a badger increases when the moon waxes and diminishes when it wanes. As nocturnal animals, some badger behaviours (notably their mating patterns) are thought to be influenced by lunar cycles. Lunar influence on its rotundity may be more dubious, but did have significant practical implications. Thomas later stated that badger fat is a useful cure for fevers, which means that it was important to know when the animal would be at its fattest and most medicinally useful, and illustrations are a good way to get that lesson across. These may not be the most accurate illustrations, but they are undoubtedly memorable, which makes them extremely effective teaching and memorization tools.

This example thus becomes a good way to demonstrate to audiences beyond the academy that the so-called “Dark Ages” were really a time of curiosity, observation, experimentation, and innovation, when science and medicine were given great importance and there was a deep investment in understanding the world around us. Medieval animal texts are a testament to a love for learning and science and stories, and therefore a great way to help the public, children and adults alike, to connect with the Middle Ages.

Of course, it’s also very possible that many of these illustrators were simply bad at drawing animals and decided to lean into the absurdity of their creations. On this, I am sure we can all relate.

Ashley Castelino, DPhil
Public Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow
Medieval Institute
University of Notre Dame

Further Reading:

For anyone interested in medieval bestiaries and animal illustrations, bestiary.ca is an invaluable resource, as is theriddleages.bham.ac.uk for anyone interested in medieval riddles. On badgers, see articles on ‘Foxes and Badgers in Anglo-Saxon Life and Landscape‘ and ‘European Badger’s Mating Activities Associated with Moon Phase‘, and Exeter Book Riddle 15.

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Song and Sustenance: The Fable of the Ant and the Cicada

Image 1: Illustration of Ant and Cicada from Tuscan bestiary, mid-15th c. Wellcome Collection, MS.132, fol. 23r.

In the well-known fable of The Ant and the Cicada1 (or cricket, or grasshopper, according to the version—the second character is always a singing insect), a hungry cicada asks an ant for food in the wintertime. The ant asks what the cicada did during the summer, and the cicada replies that she had been singing. The ant then refuses to help her, on the grounds that the cicada had been idle, when she should have been working and acquiring food for the future instead, like the ant herself had done. The moral typically advises that we avoid idleness and plan for the future.

The perspective offered by the moral may seem predictable, based on the narrative. Yet, some medieval versions of the fable suggest that the cicada, at least in her own view, was not a self-absorbed, improvident reveler—she was an uncompensated artist, who entertained others and anticipated some return for her efforts.

The fable’s morals encourage us to take the ant’s position: the cicada’s performances were not labor, and they don’t merit any material reward. As I will discuss below, certain insects’ supposed obsession with song was not always construed negatively in medieval literature; this very disregard of worldly security could also be interpreted as virtuous.

An early version of this fable is by Babrius, in Greek, from the third century; there is also a fifth-century Latin version by Avianus.2 Medieval versions can be found in several Romulus collections in Latin prose and verse,3 Marie de France’s Fables (Old French, late twelfth century), a Latin prose collection by the English bishop and sermonist John Sheppey (d. 1360), and William Caxton’s Aesop (late Middle English prose, 1483–4).

In some versions of the fable, singing seems to be a sort of solitary pastime for the cicada. For example, in John Sheppey’s version, the cicada claims that during the summer she had gone “singing and dancing through the woods, hedges and meadows” (per siluas, sepes et prata ibam, cantans et exultans).4 In Caxton’s Aesop, the cicada, asked by the ant what she has done during the summer, simply reports, “I have sung” (I haue songe).5 The ant’s callous rejoinder in these and some other versions is to the effect of, “If you sang during the summer, then dance during the winter.”6

Image 2: Illustration of cicadas from Tuscan bestiary, mid-15th c. Wellcome Collection, MS.132, fol. 4v.

However, in Marie de France’s Fables and some Romulus versions, the cicada claims she sang for other creatures, and clearly sees this as a form of labor which should be materially rewarded. Marie’s cricket replies to the ant’s inquiry as follows: “‘I sing,’ she said, ‘and so entertain the other animals, but now I don’t find anyone who wants to to repay me for it.’” (“Jeo chant,” fet il, “e si deduis / a autres bestes, mes ore ne truis / ki le me veule reguerduner,” lines 11–13).7

In the Romulus Anglicus cunctus, similarly, the cicada says, “At that time [i.e., in the summer] I was singing for those who were working, and I received no wages from them” (Ego tunc illis qui laborabant cecini, et nichil mercedis ab eis recepi).8 The ant’s dismissive response, and the morals, take the position that performing for others’ pleasure doesn’t count as work, however—material acquisition for the security of oneself and one’s family is what counts.

In every version, the morals side with the ant. John Sheppey’s version is perhaps most straightforward and harsh: “Whoever doesn’t work shouldn’t eat, and, if a worker is worthy of wages, then no wages should come to one who doesn’t work.”9 The same word, merces, which I have translated as “wages,” is used in both the Romulus Anglicus cunctus and Sheppey versions. Apparently, though the cicada clearly expected some sort of wages, she didn’t deserve them, despite all her activity.

While the ant in this fable is portrayed as fairly selfish—she is interested in providing for herself and her own household alone, and essentially refuses to give alms to a beggar—elsewhere in ancient and medieval culture ants were understood as communal animals who worked together for a common good. For example, according to Albert the Great (d. 1280), humans and ants are among those animals who “collaborate in many things in a community of affairs and sustenance, which serve the common utility.”10 The fact that the ant in The Ant and the Cicada is portrayed as possessing the foresight to gather resources ahead of time, too, is consistent with representations of ants in other medieval sources, such as in Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies, in which the ant is said to have “great shrewdness, for it provides for the future and prepares during the summer what it consumes in the winter.”11

Image 3: Illustration of ants collecting grain, from Northumberland Bestiary, 13th c. Getty Museum, MS. 100, fol. 23r.

The notion that a singing insect, such as a cricket, would be so consumed by the act of singing that it might fail to take care of its bodily needs and ultimately die, is also found in Pierre de Beauvais’s Bestiaire d’amour (early thirteenth century): the cricket “loves to sing so much that it loses its appetite, forgets itself in song, lets itself be caught and dies singing.”12

However, unlike in the fable of The Ant and the Cicada, this absorption isn’t read negatively in the Bestiaire, which concludes: “The cricket gives us the example of the just man who is always doing good deeds and penance, and forgets all about the things of this world and bodily pleasures, and thinks about everlasting joy and is always in prayer, and dies praying, that is that he dies singing just as does the cricket.”13

Whether the singing insect in these medieval texts is construed as a doer of good deeds who is “always in prayer,” as a solitary reveler, or as starving artist, the notion remains that its way of life is not compatible with material security. What I find compelling is that the cicada, in some versions of the fable discussed above, believes that there shouldn’t be such an incompatibility. She (naïvely, perhaps) expects to be supported by others for the music she offers them—and, it is implies, dies when she doesn’t receive this support.

While the fable doesn’t suggest that the cicada’s talents could or should be sustained within a broader interspecies community—quite the opposite—the message might change if we think a bit more in terms of natural history. After all, cicadas aren’t known for being able to construct complex nests in which grain can be stored, and ants aren’t known for musicality. Rather, each creature has a different modus vivendi and a different niche. I’d like to envision a scenario that counters the general fable trend of interspecies antagonism, in which each creature could provide in accordance with their own abilities, and receive in accordance with their own need.

Linnet Heald
PhD in Medieval Studies
University of Notre Dame

  1. Perry Index 112. ↩︎
  2. J. Wight Duff and Arnold M. Duff, ed. and trans., Minor Latin Poets, Volume II, Loeb Classical Library 434 (Harvard University Press, 1934), p. 734. ↩︎
  3. See Léopold Hervieux, Les fabulistes latins depuis le siècle d’Auguste jusqu’à la fin du moyen âge, vol. 2 (George Olms Verlag, 1970). ↩︎
  4. Hervieux, Les fabulistes latins, vol. 4, p. 435; my translation. Exsultare can literally mean to leap, which is amusingly appropriate given the speaker, but it can also mean to revel or rejoice. Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (Clarendon Press, 1879), s.v. “exsulto.” ↩︎
  5. R. T. Lenaghan, ed. Caxton’s Aesop: Edited with an Introduction and Notes (Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 133. ↩︎
  6. For example, John Sheppey: “Si in estate cantasti, in yeme salta.” ↩︎
  7. Charles Brucker, ed., Les fables: édition critique accompagnée d’une introduction, d’une traduction, de notes et d’un glossaire (Peeters, 1998), p. 180; my translation. ↩︎
  8. Hervieux, Les fabulistes latins, vol. 2, p. 624. ↩︎
  9. “Qui non laborat, non manducet et, si mercede dignus est operarius, non operantem nulla merces contingat.” Hervieux, Les fabulistes latins, vol. 4, p. 435; my translation. ↩︎
  10. “conferunt multa in unum communitate negotiorum et ciborum, ex quibus communi consulitur utilitati.” Albert the Great, De animalibus libri XXVI, ed. Hermann Stadler (Aschendorff, 1916), 16 [59]. Quoted in Juhana Toivanen, “‘Like Ants in a Colony We Do Our Share’: Political Animals in Medieval Philosophy,” in State and Nature: Studies in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, ed. Peter Adamson and Christof Rapp (De Gruyter, 2021), p. 368. The translation above is Toivanen’s (p. 369). ↩︎
  11. Stephen A. Barney et al., eds. The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville (Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 254. ↩︎
  12. “[I]l aime tant le canter qu’il en pert son mangier; et qu’il s’entroublit tot en chantant et s’en laise a porcachier, et muert tot en chantant.” In Le Bestiaire, version longue attribuée à Pierre de Beauvais, ed. Craig Baker (Champion, 2010), p. 159. Quoted in Nancy Freeman Regalado, “Force de parole: Shaping Courtliness in Richard de Fournival’s Bestiaire d’amours, Copied in Metz about 1312 (Oxford, Bodl. MS Douce 308),” in Shaping Courtliness in Medieval France: Essays in Honor of Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, ed. Daniel E. O’Sullivan and Laurie Shepard (Boydell  & Brewer, 2013), p. 258; translation Regalado’s. ↩︎
  13. “Par le crisnon prendons example del juste home qui adés est en bienfaits et en penanche; et met totes les choses del monde et tos delis del cors en obli, et pense pour la joie pardurable et est adés en oroison et muert tot en orrant, c’est a dire qui einsi meurt qu’il muert tot en cantant aisi comme li crisnon.” Ibid., trans. Regalado. ↩︎