A Spanish Bishop Remembers the Future: Oral Traditions and Purgatory in Julian of Toledo

Part One: Julian's Sermon Hidden in Titles

Julian of Toledo, born to Christian parents of Jewish descent, took a strong stand against Rome and was responsible for making Toledo into the pre-eminent bishopric of Visigothic Spain in the late seventh century. He also helped King Erwig retain his election by declaring his comatose predecessor Wamba a penitent and presiding over a council in which his people were released from their obligation to obey him. In the intellectual as well as political sphere, he took an aggressive stance. Julian argued against the Babylonian Talmud, insisting that the Messiah had arrived in the person of Jesus, and also wrote a grammar and some poetry (Hillgarth 1976: viii-xi). One of the pre-eminent men of his day, he also contributed notably to the creation of a Christian theology of Purgatory in his Prognosticon Futuri Saeculi, a surpisingly rational and and intimate approach to Judgment Day and the last things. In this work Julian does not offer typical medieval "prognostications," those charming books sometimes attributed to Daniel that promise to reveal the future from the imagery of your dreams, the occurrence of thunder, wind or sunshine on a Thursday, or the phase of the moon on your birthday. Julian seeks to answer a simple question: where does the soul reside between death and Judgment Day? In doing so, he creates one of the most popular works of the early Middle Ages: the Prognosticon survives in 162 complete manuscripts (ibid.:xxxiv).

In an inspired moment, Julian, who may not or may not have known Greek, chooses the Greek prognosticon over the Latin praescientia as his title and then creates a work that is sui generis: a model of clarity, consolation, and good sense. Yet, it is rare to meet anyone today who has actually read or studied this text. The Prognosticon suffers from a triple whammy of unpopularity, at least for English-speaking audiences: it is written in Latin prose by a seventh-century Spanish bishop, helps to formulate orthodox Catholic theology, and is comprised largely of quotations remembered from Julian's reading of Patristic authors. To my knowledge, it has never been translated into English, though many of the works it draws upon have been. Lacking the aesthetic appeal of poetry and the linguistic appeal of the vernacular, neither sermon nor penitential nor encyclopedia, the Prognosticon remains in the realm of systematic theology, used mostly as an ancillary citation to illuminate the Zeitgeist of the late Visigoths.

Julian's Prognosticon is one of the earliest works to formulate in some coherent way the fate of the human soul between individual death and Judgment Day in the medieval Christian tradition. Jacques LeGoff, of course, is the leading historian of the creation of the realm of Purgatory and its fullest formulation in late medieval scholastic theology (LeGoff 1984). The vast mythology of Purgatory includes Bede's account of Dryhthelm's vision wherein souls are flung between regions of burning heat and freezing cold, Dante's multi-terraced Mount of Purgatory, medieval French confessions to Jacques Fournier that describe the dead traveling by night from church to church around southern France, Hamlet's father's ghost's assertion that he is "doomed for a certain time to walk the night," and folk songs such as the Lyke Wake Dirge, which admonishes one to give shoes, hose, silver, gold, food, and drink to the poor, because those gifts will protect you as you cross over the Thorny Moor and the Bridge of Dread to Purgatory. To this day pilgrims travel to Saint Patrick's Purgatory in Ireland, and countless visions in romance, epic, sermon, fantasy, science fiction (even TV dramas such as "Neverwhere" and "Lost") remind us of the fluid boundary between this world and the immediate next. Much of this mythology can be attributed to oral tradition, popular religious customs, and folk tales about communing with the dead.

Julian's work initially seems to come from a very different, learned and written tradition. Like most Christian theologians, Julian must resolve the paradox arising from the words...