In his cryptic answer to a disciple's question "What shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the consummation of the world?" Christ issues the ominous remark that "of that day and hour no one knoweth, no not the angels of heaven, but the Father alone" (Matthew 24:36; cf. Mark 13:32),1 a statement that has provoked endless speculation about the time of Christ's return and the signs that will announce it. 2 Chronologies of the second coming and of Judgment form a staple of Christian eschatology and are so widely reflected in medieval art and literature that it might be said that medieval eschatology as a whole is dominated by questions of time and history.3 Chiliastic beliefs in a messianic interregnum, prophecies of a Last World Emperor, patterns of decline and renewal, the progressive shortening of time, the number and sequence of the signs of Doomsday, the chronicling of Christ's return in terms of world ages and the cosmic week these are among the themes that recur with greatest frequency in medieval discussions of the last things, and all are centrally concerned with time. Much rarer is it to encounter the question of where the last events are to take place, but this is not to say the issue was never a cause for discussion, since the problem of the location of Judgment figures repeatedly in medieval sources given to a faithful and complete account of the end of the world.4 In the medieval West, generally speaking, there were two dominant, carefully formulated answers to the question of where Judgment will occur, as well as aberrant and idiosyncratic developments of each, all relying on scriptural foundations. Tracing the histories of these answers can tell us much about the erratic and unstable character of medieval eschatology and can alert us to the doctrinal allegiances of many important texts. In the limited survey that follows, I would like to review the origins and dissemination of these traditions and comment on their relation to a broader problem in medieval eschatology,
We can begin with the very elusiveness of Christ's answer in Matthew 24, his claim that no one knows the finer details of God's plans for the end of time. This assurance that even the most basic truths about Judgment are beyond human knowledge accounts not only for the mystery and intrigue of the subject but also for the rhetorical modes of response it elicits, particularly in works that present themselves as working within the biblical tradition. Most early apocalypses, both Jewish and Christian, show no concern whatsoever for the location of Last Judgment for the obvious reason that these texts, when concerned with Judgment at all, tend to engage in allegorical or symbolic language that places future events in a realm outside the physical, experiential universe. The ecstatic visions of Judgment in the Apocalypse of Peter or the New Testament Revelation of John, for instance, move oneirically through disjointed sequences of anthropomorphic and theriomorphic imagery in patterns Amos Wilder has characterized as "kaleidoscopic rearrangements of a numinous repertoire."5 By its very nature, the language of apocalypse thus distances itself from personal experience, and the events it describes are unlocalizable.
Even when places are mentioned by name, such as Babylon or Sodom, they invariably resonate with symbolic significance. Works in an apocalyptic tradition typically entail a vision not of physical geography but of an imaginary geography, or more often of an imaginary cosmography that takes the seer far from the known world. In those cases where apocalyptic texts do concentrate on the events of this world, they prove overwhelmingly interested in the chronology of cataclysmic signs leading up to the End, or in the likelihood of a messianic kingdom inaugurated by the second coming and lasting until the End. They consistently overlook the End itself. The emphasis of medieval apocalypses such as the Apocalypse of Thomas or the Byzantine Apocalypse of Daniel rests entirely on the sequence of marvels prophesied to take place during the last days in anticipation of Judgment, but as if impelled by a rhetorical strategy of approach-avoidance, they stop short of the very event they prophesy. In visionary apocalypses like 4 Ezra or the Apocalypse of Paul (and its medieval Latin offspring the Visio Pauli), the greater part of the seer's energy is expended on descriptions of heaven and hell and the abodes of the souls after Judgment. Again the moment of Judgment itself escapes analysis. Much the same is observable in medieval drama and the visual arts, which tend to represent the Last Judgment, as Pamela Sheingorn has observed, as a "visionary scene, lacking reference to linear time or the solid, three-dimensional matter of earth, its landscapes, or inhabitants."6 For this reason, iconographic depictions of Judgment frequently rely on architectural symbolism to portray the hierarchical relation of the three cosmic regions of heaven, earth, and hell, or on metaphorical and indirect models such as the parables of the wise and foolish virgins or of the good shepherd separating his sheep from his goats. Rarely do medieval artists present the Last Judgment as an event that takes place on earth,
When patristic and medieval authors do profess belief in a universal Judgment that can be localized geographically, they do so most often in fulfillment of the eschatological vision of the Old Testament prophet Joel, whose third chapter opens with the words, "For behold in those days, and in that time when I shall bring back the captivity of Juda and Jerusalem: I will gather together all nations, and will bring them down into the valley of Josaphat.... Let them arise, and let the nations come up into the valley of Josaphat: for there I will sit to judge all nations round about" (Joel 3:1-2, 12). For Joel and his earliest audience the identity of the Valley of Josaphat (or Jehosaphat) as the site of the Last Judgment was secured by the etymology of the phrase "valley of Josaphat" (emeq yehosapat) itself, which in Hebrew means "the valley where Yahweh judges." This much was affirmed for medieval audiences by Jerome, who in his commentary on the Book of Joel reduces the Hebrew etymology to a succinct equation, "Josaphat, id est, Domini judicium."7 If such a place existed at the time of Joel's writing its location remains unknown.8 A popular tradition traceable back to at least the fourth century identifies it with the Kidron Valley just to the east of Jerusalem across from the Mount of Olives,9 and this is where from the fourth century on Jewish, Christian, and Moslem authors alike have sought to situate the Last Judgment.10
As a topic of geographical lore, the location of Judgment in the Valley of Josaphat was first established in the sixth-century Breviary of Jerusalem, which completes its tour of the environs of Jerusalem with a view from the Mount of Olives: "There on the right-hand side is the Valley of Josaphat; there will the Lord judge the just and the sinful. And there is a small stream which will spew forth fire in the conflagration of the world."11 This description was eventually adopted as a commonplace in medieval itineraries and was affirmed, for example, by an anonymous pilgrim of the eleventh century,12 by the mid-fourteenth-century Guide Book to Palestine,13 and with characteristic delight in the mysteries of sacred geography in Mandeville's Travels, which situates the Valley of Josaphat between the Mount of Olives and Mount Tabor, the site of the Transfiguration:
In þat hill [Mount Tabor] 7 in þat same place at the day of doom .iiij. Aungeles with .iiij. trompes schull blowen 7 reysen all men þat hadden suffred deth sith that the world was formed from deth to lyue. And schull comen in body and soule to juggement before the face of oure lord in the vale of Iosaphath.14
For the Mandevillian narrator and other medieval geographers, it was no coincidence that the other main reason to memorialize the Valley of Josaphat was that this was also the site of the Virgin Mary's tomb, a belief traceable to the fifth-century apocryphal Transitus Mariae and an idea absorbed into popular lore long before the high Middle Ages.15 Medieval authors frequently exploit the overlap of these two traditions for narrative and thematic cogency. In the Voluminous Wanderings of Felix Fabri (c. 1480-83) the coincidence of the two events in the Valley of Josaphat assumes doctrinal import, as it proves the nature of Mary's role at final Judgment:
Nor ought we to think that it was by chance that the most blessed Virgin Mary chose her place of sepulture in the valley of Jehoshaphat, but to the intent that the sinner who fears to stand in this valley on the dreadful day of Judgment which is to come, may now take up his place beforehand in that valley, and pray to the Mother, show forth his obedience to her, and thus cease to fear being called into the valley a second time if he shall obtain the favour of the Mother who will be his judge.16
On the day of Judgment, Felix goes on to say, "those sinners who are damned shall stand in the valley of Jehoshaphat," a valley itself accursed because "devils used to be worshipped in it, and divination was practised in it" (cf. 2 Chronicles 28). Nor should we be troubled, he explains, by the narrowness of that valley, because when the moment of Judgment arrives, the valley will be broadened into an immense plain that will easily accommodate all the sinners in the world.17
Given the prominence of these teachings about Judgment at the Valley of Josaphat in medieval itineraries, it comes as some surprise that Jerome's musings on the place name's Hebrew etymology were repeated by few early Christian exegetes. Julian of Toledo and Haymo of Auxerre are the only writers I find before the twelfth century who invoke Jerome's comments as doctrine.18 But in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries there was an impressive revival of interest in the topic, particularly among sermon writers and scholastic theologians bent on compiling an exhaustive inventory of Christian teachings about Judgment. Within a span of just over a hundred years, the Valley of Josaphat was proclaimed the future site of Judgment by, among others, Honorius Augustodunensis, Rupert of Deutz, Robert Pullen of Oxford, Peter Lombard, Richard of St. Victor, Magister Bandinus, and Martín of León.19 These authors read Joel's prophecy in remarkably different ways, some endorsing it as a sign of future reality, others opposing it to alternative biblically sanctioned explanations for the site of Judgment, some finding it necessary to reconcile this belief with different traditions altogether. For Werner II of Küssenberg, abbot of Saint-Blaise (d. c. 1126), the verses from Joel yield a topographical allegory of
For Judgment will take place in the Valley of Josaphat, as it is said. The Valley of Josaphat is said to be the valley of Judgment. A valley is always next to a mountain. The valley is this world; the mountain is heaven. Thus Judgment will take place in the valley, that is in this world, which is to say in the air, where the just will be positioned to the right of Christ like sheep, while the impious will be placed to his left like goats.20
Werner's qualification that Judgment will take place in the air at the Valley of Josaphat conflates two biblical themes, one already obvious, the other taking support from Christ's comment that on the day of Judgment, "then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven . . . and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with much power and majesty" (Matthew 24:30). These two originally distinct beliefs are often opposed by medieval authors, while some (like Werner) see in them two compatible tenets of a unified doctrine. Christian Druthmarus of Corbie juxtaposes these ideas to argue against a literal reading of the verses from Joel: "Many have supposed that the future Judgment will take place in the Valley of Josaphat, which is a place in Judea; but this is not at all true, even though Josaphat means 'judgment,' for it will be in the air, as Paul says, 'We will be taken into the air, and then we will be with the Lord forever'."21 The full form of the verse cited here, 1 Thessalonians 4:15-17, was critical to this argument: "For the lord himself shall come down from heaven with commandment, and with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God: and the dead who are in Christ, shall rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, shall be taken up together with them in the clouds to meet Christ, into the air, and so shall we be always with the Lord."
By far the most influential statement on the relation of these two eschatological doctrines is that of Peter Lombard, who finds a means of reconciling them but in the process introduces a new twist to the question of where Judgment will take place. He locates it at the junction of three sites: the air, the Valley of Josephat, and the Mount of Olives:
Some people maintain that the Lord will descend for Judgment at the Valley of Josaphat, the one spoken about by the prophet Joel: I will gather together all nations, and will bring them down into the valley of Josaphat, and I will dispute with them there. Some childishly take this to mean that the Lord will descend for Judgment at this valley, which is to the side of the Mount of Olives; but this is ridiculous, because it will not be on earth that he will sit but in a region of the air across from the site of the Mount of Olives, from which he ascended. On the other
For the idea that Christ will return at the Mount of Olives, whence he ascended, one need turn only to Acts 1:11, "This same Jesus, who is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as you have seen him go into heaven." The symmetry of this belief no doubt had wide appeal among Christian exegetes accustomed to thinking in terms of typological balance and recapitulation. Aquinas writes that Christ will return at the parousia "probably in the vicinity of the Mount of Olives" because this was the site of the ascension.23 An early medieval question-and-answer dialogue similarly asserts in response to the question "How will the resurrection take place?" that all will be resurrected (in the form their bodies had when they were thirty years old) on the Day of Judgment, which is to take place at the Mount of Olives, the site of Christ's ascension and the center of the world.24 Other writers found additional reasons for assigning the Mount of Olives an important role in the geography of Doomsday. In his commentary on the Book of Daniel, Jerome states that as a prelude to the final days, Antichrist will fix his tents on the Mount of Olives,25 a comment later writers evidently took to mean that much of Antichrist's career, including his demise, was to be associated with this site. The Tuburtine Sibyl and Adso's Letter on the Antichrist both declare that as a prerequisite for final Judgment, Antichrist will be slain by the Archangel Michael on the Mount of Olives across from the spot where Christ ascended.26
Ultimately, however, these arguments by Peter Lombard and others that Judgment would take place in the air across from the Mount of Olives, or at the Mount of Olives itself, proved little more than quibbling alternatives to the more commonly held view that Judgment would be located just next to the Mount of Olives in the Valley of Josaphat, a tradition widely represented in vernacular sermons and mystery plays,27 in Joca monachorum dialogues,28 in commentaries on the text of Joel,29 and even in an anonymous sixteenth-century volksbuch entitled the Wahrhaftige Beschreibung des Jüngstens Gerichts im Thal Josaphat.30 In Canto 10 of the Inferno, Dante has Virgil tell the pilgrim-narrator that all the lids of the open sepulchres he sees before him in hell will be closed for good once the cursed spirits return from the Valley of Josaphat after Judgment with the bodies they left above.31 In Middle English literature, the Valley of Josaphat is identified as the "place of dome" in Piers Plowman,32 in the Cursor Mundi,33 and perhaps most conspicuously in the Pricke of Conscience, which devotes some ninety lines to a description of the site of Judgment alone.34
This first tradition, then, locating universal Judgment at the Valley of
The last day had come. Doomsday was at hand. . . . The archangel Michael, the prince of the heavenly host, appeared glorious and terrible against the sky. With one foot on the sea and one foot on the land he blew from the archangelical trumpet the brazen death of time. The three blasts of the angel filled all the universe. Time is, time was but time shall be no more. At the last blast the souls of universal humanity throng towards the valley of Jehoshaphat, rich and poor, gentle and simple, wise and foolish, good and wicked.36
Apart from this tradition inherited by Joyce, the only competing idea that occurs with enough regularity to merit the term "tradition" is the belief that God will assemble the hosts of mankind for Judgment at the other mountain flanking the Valley of Josaphat, Mount Sion. An example familiar to readers of Old English occurs at the opening of Christ III, where we are warned that at midnight Doomsday will come like a thief in the night and the blessed will be called together on Mount Sion:
Swa on Syne beorg somod up cymeð
mægenfolc micel, meotude getrywe,
beorht ond bliþe. Him weorþeð blæd gifen! (875-77)37
(Then a great multitude will ascend Mount Sion together, those faithful to the Lord, bright and joyful; to them will glory be given.)
In the lines that follow, the poet declares that angels will trumpet the advent of Judgment from the four corners of the earth. The dead will rise, and once again a sign will be given from atop Mount Sion, where Christ will appear in majesty:
þonne semninga on Syne beorg
suþaneastan sunnan leoma
cymeð of scyppende scynan leohtor
þonne hit men mægen modum ahycgan,
beorhte blican, þonne bearn godes
þurh heofona gehleodu hider oðyweð.
Cymeð wundorlic Cristes onsyn,
æþelcyninges wlite, eastan fram roderum,
on sefan swete sinum folce,
biter bealofullum, gebleod wundrum,
eadgum ond earmum ungelice. (899-909)
(Then suddenly on Mount Sion, from the southeast, the radiance of the sun will come shining from the Creator, brighter than men can imagine in their minds, gleaming bright when the Son of God reveals himself here through the vaults of the heavens. Christ's wondrous figure, the form of the noble King, will come from the east from out of the skies, sweet to the minds of his own folk, bitter to the wicked, wondrously diverse and different to the blessed and the wretched.)
As medieval eschatological doctrine goes, the placement of the parousia and final Judgment at Mount Sion is comparatively rare. But it is an idea nonetheless firmly rooted in Ancient Near Eastern cosmology and in echoes of that teaching in biblical prophecy and early apocryphal apocalyptic. In Canaanite and Old Testament literature, theophanic events are frequently situated at a sacred mountain, a monumental axis along which the three cosmic regions of heaven, earth, and hell are aligned and where communion between them is made possible.38 Moses thus receives the law of God atop Mount Sinai, the garden of Eden is identified as a holy mountain in Ezekiel 28, and numerous Psalms describe a violent theophany centered on a mountain (e.g., Psalm 17:8-20 [= 2 Kings 22:8-20]; Psalm 49). Nowhere, however, is the symbolism of a cosmic mountain so vividly presented as in beliefs surrounding Mount Sion, the place Isaiah 2:2-4 distinguishes as the house of God and the future site of Judgment:
In the latter days, established shall be the mountain of the house of Yahweh. At the head of the mountains (it shall be high), and it will be higher than the hills. And all the nations shall flow to it. And many people will come and say, "Come, and let us go up to the mountain of Yahweh, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us his ways, and we may walk in his paths." Surely from Sion shall come forth the Law, and the word of Yahweh from Jerusalem. And he shall judge between the nations, and shall decide for many peoples. And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not take up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.
Elsewhere Mount Sion is the focus of judgment and destruction in the Psalms, Abdias, Hebrews, and Jubilees,39 while in New Testament literature Mount Sion is most explicitly and dramatically associated with Judgment in Apocalypse 14:1, a verse still invoked from time to time as a key to the events of the last days: "And I beheld, and lo a lamb stood upon mount Sion, and with him an hundred forty-four thousand, having his name, and the name of his Father, written on their foreheads." The pseudepigraphal 4 Ezra, which occasionally circulated in medieval copies of the Vulgate, similarly culminates in a rhapsodic vision of the elect being received into glory on Mount Sion. A multitude of the faithful, clothed in white and singing praises to the Lord, ascend Mount Sion, where they are crowned by the Son of God and are seated at the heavenly banquet.40 These verses from biblical and pseudepigraphal texts support an idea quite independent of teachings about Judgment at the Valley of Josaphat, that at the end of time the elect will congregate for Judgment at Mount Sion. Against this background, the opening of Christ III emerges as a passage anchored in biblical as well as pseudepigraphal tradition and with dilute echoes of ancient Near Eastern cosmology, but with a rhetorical force indebted wholly to the conventions of Old English religious verse. Its emphasis in the first few lines on Mount Sion as the site of Judgment provides a momentarily stable focus for the tumultuous patterns of imagery that follow and marks the text from the outset as a learned specimen of occult prophecy cast in poetic form.
In medieval vernacular literature, the most cogent analogues for the opening scene of Christ III are exclusively in early Irish sources, a connection Frederick Biggs recently established in an article that relates the opening of the poem to a nexus of eschatological motifs in Irish and Hiberno-Latin. As Biggs points out, what the Old English poet actually says is not that a universal Last Judgment will take place at Mount Sion, where the blessed and damned will be judged together, but that the blessed alone will congregate there in glory. If the cursed are to be judged separately, it presumably must be elsewhere a
This is the token of the Day before Doom, to wit, the pure King of Glory, the only Son of the King of heaven and earth and hell, with a countless multitude of angels and archangels, to wit, the nine ranks of heaven, in his company [will go] on that day to the summit of mount Sion to judge their deeds, both good and evil, for Adam's impure race.42
This example, together with an impressive series of related ones from the Amra Coluim-Cille, the Evernew Tongue, and the Irish pseudo-Jerome commentary on Matthew, leads Biggs to speculate that the opening scene of Christ III makes use of a distinctively insular brand of eschatology drawn probably from Latin sermons written in an Irish or Irish-influenced milieu.43
An analogue Biggs does not cite but that illustrates perfectly the conviction of early Irish authors that Judgment will occur at Mount Sion is the little-known Middle Irish story in the Liber Flavus Fergusiorum which Paul Grosjean titled "A Tale of Doomsday Colum Cille Should Have Left Untold."44 The story relates a prophecy ascribed to St. Columba about the manner in which the Irish and the Irish alone--will be judged. On the Day of Judgment, the Irish will assemble at Clonmacnois in the presence of St. Patrick. The line of men and women will stretch from Clonmacnois all the way to Dun Coilli in Scotland. The bell in Croagh Patrick will ring out, and the dead will rise to join them. Then Patrick and the Irish, both living and dead, will journey to Mount Sion, where they will encounter Saints Peter, Paul, and Martin and will together await universal Judgment. But in a last-minute deviation from this plan, St. Patrick will urge Peter, Paul, and Martin to remain atop Mount Sion to convene with Christ, while the Irish will continue separately to the Mount of Olives for their own self-appointed judgment at the hands of St. Patrick himself. Patrick's emissary, St. Ailbhe, will meanwhile stay behind on Mount Sion to negotiate with Christ over the peculiar fate of the Irish, and this is how the negotiation will begin:
The Lord will give him welcome, and Christ will ask: "Where is the lightning of the western world today? He is long in coming to this assembly." "He will come," quoth Ailbhe. Christ will say: "He brought many sinners with him and many bad men." "That is not as
As the negotiation ensues, Ailbhe bargains with Christ over what percentage of the Irish are to be judged by Christ and what percentage by Patrick. But no matter what arrangement Christ proposes, Patrick turns him down, holding stubbornly to the opinion that all the Irish, regardless of their sins, deserve to go to heaven. In the end, a frustrated Christ insists that at least the druids, satirists, lampooners, and heresiarchs should be left behind for judgment along with everyone else. But again Patrick refuses, and Christ reluctantly allows the hosts of Ireland to pass, without judgment or penance, into the nine hierarchies of heaven. And this, the story concludes, is why Colum Cille's prophecy should never be told on earth: because the uncommon fate of the Irish is to be known only among the saints of heaven.
The peculiarly Irish cast of this story, devoted as it is to the exploits of Patrick and Ailbhe, is heavily colored by features of traditional Irish eschatology organized around two motifs borrowed from early Patrician hagiography. Ailbhe's statement that Patrick viewed the Irish as penitents who had spent seven years under the sea is an oblique allusion to one of the three (or four) famous petitions which Patrick made to God on Croagh Patrick on the day of his death and which God accordingly granted. Five Lives of Patrick dating from the seventh century to the twelfth (Tírechán's Collectanea, the Vita tertia, the Vita auctore Probo, the tripartite Bethu Phátraic, and the Gloucester Vita) explain, in various degrees of detail and consistency, that on his deathday Patrick entreated God to submerge Ireland in the sea seven years prior to Doomsday so the Irish would avoid persecution by Antichrist.46 A parallel tradition, first recorded in Muirchú's seventh-century Vita s. Patricii and repeated elsewhere, adds that in fulfillment of a second petition before God, Patrick alone would be allowed to judge the Irish on Doomsday.47 These two petitions were fundamental in establishing the familiar folk themes of God's special dispensation for the Irish and of Patrick's role as national patron saint and intercessor.
In adapting these two hagiographic motifs to a uniquely Irish vision of Judgment, the "Tale of Doomsday Colum Cille Should Have Left Untold" alienates itself from what we might think of as the mainstream eschatology of the medieval Latin West. But it does provide a striking corollary to Biggs's thesis that Mount Sion was favored as the site of Judgment in early insular tradition, a tradition dominated by Irish and Hiberno-Latin texts but with at
Both the larger traditions I have been discussing (Judgment at the Valley of Josaphat and at Mount Sion) and the lesser ones as well (Judgment in the air and at the Mount of Olives) depend to a great extent on the rigidly historical interpretation of biblical verses. This leads me to a closing observation about the conservative exegetical impulse of much medieval eschatology, an impulse guided largely by the form and genre of the works that embody it. Bernard McGinn has attempted to strike a broad contrast between ultimately Eastern eschatology and ultimately Western eschatology by observing that on the whole, Eastern eschatology is dominated by pseudonymous visions, while medieval Western authors were more likely to express their eschatological views through the medium of sermons, scriptural commentaries, and theological treatises.48 One can always find exceptions to such a rule, but in virtually all the texts cited in this paper, the answer to a question about future events has been sought and found not through theophanic visions or ecstatic prophecies but through scriptural interpretation of a fundamentally historical character. An author such as the Christ III poet might still engage in imaginative and original expositions of his subject, but his primary models remained biblical literature generally (including apocryphal and pseudepigraphal texts) and its commentaries. Where medieval traditions about the site of Judgment prove most