Category: Departments & Disciplines

Posted on

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).

Posted on

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.

Posted on

Aries Across the Ages: Bighorn Sheep, Medieval Rams, and Springtime Symbolism

Since relocating from England and returning to my hometown in Colorado somewhat unexpectedly, I’ve been spending a lot of time soaking up the sunshine by the Arkansas river, and when a bighorn sheep approached the bank to drink the other day, it was not only a sure sign of spring but also a reminder of how medieval symbolism and modern day animals create connections across time and space, even entire continents.

Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep, one of seven subspecies native to North America, occupy mountainous areas in the United States and Canada. They are named for the male’s large, curved horns, a pair of which can weigh up to 30 pounds – the equivalent of the weight of all the bones in the male’s body. They are powerful, steadfast creatures with males weighing upward of 500 pounds.

Male bighorn sheet. Photo courtesy of The National Wildlife Federation Blog.

During rutting season, which runs from October to January, rams battle for dominance and breeding rights with ewes. After descending from steep, treacherous terrain to lower territory, males can be observed rearing and smashing their horns together in a violent collision, producing sounds that can be heard up to 40 miles away.   

Rams butting heads. British Library, Yates Thompson MS 13 [Taymouth Hours], folio 183r.

Indeed, we are in the season of the Ram, just as the Western medieval world would have been at this time of year. The sun entered the constellation Aries, the ram, on March 20th in line with the spring, or vernal, equinox in the northern hemisphere and will remain in this astrological sign until approximately the same date in April before transitioning into Taurus, the bull.

The spring equinox marks the moment the sun crosses the celestial equator, bringing nearly equal day and night lengths and signifying the start of spring. When the sun passes through Aries, it also marks the astrological new year. As the first sign of the zodiac, Aries season symbolizes a reset after a long winter and a sense of reemergence, both in modern and medieval times.

Ram depicted in Bibliothèque Municipale de Douai, MS 711 [De Natura animalium], folio 18r.

In the medieval world, the season was perfect for pilgrimage. The characters of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, of course, begin their journey to Canterbury in mid-April as described by the first several lines of the General Prologue:

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, an the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne… (Chaucer 1-8).

When April with its sweet-smelling showers
Has pierced the drought of March to the root,
And bathed every vein (of the plants) in such liquid
By which power the flower is created;
When the West Wind also with its sweet breath,
In every wood and field has breathed life into
The tender new leaves, and the young sun
Has run half its course in Aries… (Translation from Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website)

Sheep have maintained a strong presence in the English landscape since their domestication during the Neolithic era. Although they were not initially valued as highly as other livestock, they were integral in the early medieval period as providers of milk, wool, and manure. Their bodies were also harvested for meat, skin, fat, bones, and horns. They were hardy animals, able to thrive on rough grazing and survive during harsh winters.

A shepherd holding a lamb and tending a flock of sheep, including two rams in the foreground. Cambridge University Library, Kk.4.25 [Bestiary (Third Family)], folio 58v.

They were also used for ecclesiastical purposes. The best vellum was produced from either calf or lamb skin, and regular parchment was procured from the skin of sheep and goats. Additionally, rams were some of the first animals to be sacrificed on altars in the ancient world. Isidore of Seville, in his 7th-century Etymologies, writes, “The ram [aries] is either named after the word aris, that is, after ‘Mars’ whence we call the males in a flock ‘males’ [mas, maris] – or because this animal was the first to be sacrificed on altars [ara, aris] by pagans.”

Further to the etymological origins of the word, the Oxford English Dictionary defines a “ram” simply as an adult male sheep, and the word has remained relatively unchanged since it first appearance in English during the Anglo Saxon period, wherein rams appear as sacrifices in Biblical stories, notably that of Abraham, and other Christian contexts.

Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac with ram behind. Morgan Library & Museum, Bible historiale MS M.322 I, fol. 032r.

The term ram, however, also appeared in the context of battle, describing both a weapon of war (later renamed the “battering ram”) and the action of ramming as with the weapon itself, just as two rams would collide in conflict. Circa 1470, Thomas Malory in Morte Darthur describes how knights “hurteled togydirs lyke too rammes,” emphasizing the brute strength and blunt impact of the men as their bodies meet in battle.

At this time of year, bighorn sheep are less interested in fighting and more focused on lambing. Females typically give birth between late April and June, during which time they find steep, secluded habitats to protect their newborn babies from predators like mountain lions, coyotes, and bears. Males, during this time, live apart from females, maintaining a hierarchy of dominance amongst themselves. The separation during the springtime season creates an apt juxtaposition of violence and renewal from an ecological perspective, as well as a personal one: the hardest part has passed, and rebirth is possible.

The sighting of a bighorn sheep in early spring — powerfully yet gracefully poised on a rocky mountainside — poignantly connects my Colorado roots with my medieval interests and my previous home in England. It also reminds me that I am on the precipice of a new life after a difficult struggle, that this season symbolizes the beauty of living after a battle.

Emily McLemore, Ph.D.
Alumni Contributor, Department of English