Chapter 14

Medieval Dissenters

Mystics, Limbo, and Quiet Voices Beneath the Scholastic Consensus

A. The Anchoress at Norwich

In May of 1373, in a small English city on the river Wensum, a thirty-year-old woman was dying. She had asked God, years before, for three gifts: a deeper sense of Christ's passion, a near-fatal sickness while she was still young, and three wounds — of contrition, compassion, and longing for God.¹ The third she had kept. On the seventh day of her illness, the parish priest came with a crucifix and held it before her eyes. She thought she was about to die. Instead, she received sixteen showings — sixteen visions of the love of God in Christ — that would occupy her for the rest of her life.

We do not know her name. She is called Julian only because the anchorhold she later inhabited was attached to St. Julian's Church in Norwich. Her book, written first in a short version and then expanded over twenty years and more, is the first book in English we can confidently say was written by a woman.² She called it her Revelations of Divine Love.

Somewhere in those revelations, Julian was given a question she could not let go. The Church taught — and Julian believed — that some souls would be damned. But what God seemed to be showing her was that "all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."³ She refused to deny either side. She held them in tension. She asked God how both could be true. And God told her, in a passage we will come to, that he would do "a great deed" at the end of time, the nature of which would remain hidden until then.

This is the chapter where we meet the quiet voices of the late medieval West. The picture most of us have inherited is of a monolithic Latin Christendom in which everyone, from the village priest to the university doctor, taught one and the same doctrine of eternal hell. In the last chapter we saw that consensus crystallize in Anselm and Aquinas. It was real, and it was strong. But it was not as monolithic as the popular caricature suggests. Beneath the surface of the scholastic textbooks, the long hope kept finding ways to surface — in mystical sermons, in the unresolved tensions of the limbo doctrine, in heterodox movements at the margins.

B. A World of Many Voices

The figures we will meet in this chapter span roughly a century and a half, from the late thirteenth to the early fifteenth century. They lived under the long shadow of the Augustinian-Thomist synthesis. Most of them were obedient sons and daughters of the Church. None of them set out to be heretics. Several of them paid a price for being misread.

Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–1328) was a German Dominican who taught at Paris and preached in the vernacular at Strasbourg and Cologne. Johann Tauler (c. 1300–1361) and Henry Suso (c. 1295–1366) were Eckhart's spiritual heirs — also Dominicans, also German, also preachers to lay people. The anonymous author of the Theologia Germanica wrote around 1350 in the same Rhineland current. Julian of Norwich (c. 1342–after 1416) lived a generation later in England, breathing much the same air.⁴ Beyond the mystics stood other dissenting voices: the Spiritual Franciscans drawn to the apocalyptic visions of Joachim of Fiore; the Cathars, whose dualism was something else entirely; the Wycliffites and Hussites; and, hovering over the entire period, the troubling question of the unbaptized infants — what we call, in shorthand, limbo.

None of these voices is universalist in the way Gregory of Nyssa was universalist. None of them speaks plainly, as Origen had, of the eventual restoration of all things. The medieval West did not allow that kind of plainness. What we find instead is something subtler: a refusal to close down the question of mercy, a holding open of the door, a quiet but persistent witness that the Augustinian consensus did not say everything that needed to be said.

C. What the Figures Actually Said

Meister Eckhart and the Divine Ground

Eckhart was a man of two languages and two registers. In Latin, he was a scholastic — Magister of theology at Paris, the same chair Aquinas once held. He wrote commentaries, disputed in the schools, taught the standard curriculum. In German, he was something else. From the pulpits of Strasbourg and Cologne, he preached to nuns and lay people in a daring, paradoxical idiom about the soul and God.⁵

The center of Eckhart's preaching is what he called the Grund — the ground of the soul. There is a place in us, he said, so deep, so unconditioned, so simple, that it is one with God. He sometimes called it the Seelenfunklein — pronounced "ZAY-len-foonk-lein," a German word meaning "little spark of the soul."⁶ The Latin equivalent he used was scintilla animae. Bernard McGinn calls this Eckhart's most distinctive theme: a soul whose ground the divine has never abandoned.⁷

If that sounds dangerous, it was. Eckhart never directly denied eternal hell. But the logic of his vision pressed in a different direction. If the ground of every soul is one with God, what becomes of the doctrine that some souls are eternally cut off from God? Eckhart never quite said. He gestured. He hinted. He told his hearers that God's love seeks every soul without exception, that nothing can finally escape the divine ground that gave it being.⁸ In his Book of Divine Consolation, written around 1308 for the bereaved Queen Agnes of Hungary, he insists that God wills the salvation of every creature. Oliver Davies notes that such statements, torn from their mystical context, were always going to sound dangerous to a suspicious inquisitor.⁹

And the inquisitors came. In 1326 a heresy proceeding was opened against Eckhart in Cologne. He appealed to Pope John XXII at Avignon and died before judgment, sometime in early 1328. The Pope's response came posthumously. On March 27, 1329, the bull In Agro Dominico condemned twenty-eight propositions from Eckhart's works — seventeen declared heretical, eleven judged "evil-sounding, rash, and suspect of heresy" but capable of orthodox interpretation if rightly understood.¹⁰ Modern scholars — McGinn, Davies, Edmund Colledge — have argued that the inquisitorial commission misread Eckhart at almost every point, lifting his propositions out of context and refusing to see that his German preaching was doing something other than systematic theology.¹¹ The Eckhart of the condemnation is not the Eckhart of the sermons. But the condemnation did its work. For centuries his name was a warning, and his sermons survived chiefly in monasteries where disciples copied them without attribution. He had to be rediscovered.

Tauler, Suso, and the Theologia Germanica

Eckhart's heirs were more careful. Johann Tauler — Strasbourg-born, Dominican-trained, formed by the friends of God (a network of late-medieval German laypeople and clergy committed to interior piety) — preached the same vision of the soul's union with God but in more pastorally restrained registers. He told his hearers that God's love is wider than they had been taught. He spoke of Gelassenheit — "guh-LAH-sen-hite," a German word meaning "letting-go" or "releasement" — by which the soul abandons itself to the divine will. He did not contradict the doctrine of eternal hell. He simply did not dwell on it. His sermons keep the door of mercy open by what they say and by what they do not say.¹²

Henry Suso, Eckhart's other great disciple, wrote his Little Book of Eternal Wisdom (c. 1328) as a series of meditations on the suffering of Christ and the soul's response. Suso did speak of hell — vividly, in one harrowing passage where a damned soul recounts its agonies. But the burden of his book is the overwhelming generosity of divine love. Suso's hell is rhetorical machinery for conversion, not the central thing he wants the reader to remember.¹³

Between Tauler and Suso, in the same Rhineland tradition, an anonymous author composed sometime around 1350 a small book that would later be edited by Martin Luther and given the title Theologia Germanica. Luther praised it lavishly, saying that besides the Bible and Augustine he had learned more from this little book about God, Christ, and the human creature than from any other.¹⁴ The Theologia Germanica teaches the soul's perfection through the abandonment of self-will. It speaks of heaven as life in conformity to God's will and hell as life in conformity to one's own. It does not deny the eternity of hell, but its emphasis falls so heavily on the universal scope of divine love and the soul's intrinsic capacity for God that the reader is left, again, with the impression of a door not quite closed. This was the inheritance the Anabaptists and Pietists would later receive — a thread we pick up in Chapter 16, where Pietist universalism flows directly out of the Rhineland mystical stream.

Julian of Norwich

If the Rhineland mystics kept the door open by indirection, Julian of Norwich pushed it ajar — gently and with extraordinary patience.

The historical Julian is largely invisible. She was probably born in late 1342 or early 1343. She was thirty when the showings came, on May 13, 1373.¹⁵ She wrote a short account soon after her recovery and then spent more than twenty years brooding over the revelations, rewriting and expanding them into what we call the Long Text. She lived as an anchoress — a solo religious recluse enclosed in a small room attached to a parish church, supported by donations, available to visitors through a window for spiritual counsel. From this strange position she produced one of the most theologically substantive devotional works of the Middle Ages.¹⁶

The heart of Julian's book, for our purposes, is the thirteenth revelation. She has been shown the love of God in the wounded Christ. But she keeps coming back to a problem. If God's love is what these visions are showing her, what about sin? What about damnation? What about the souls — "Christian and heathen alike" — who fall outside the covenant of mercy as the Church preaches it?¹⁷

God's answer, as Julian receives it, comes in stages. The first stage is the famous formula in chapter 27 of the Long Text:

The Middle English word behovely is not easy to render. It can mean "fitting," "necessary," "useful," or "behooves." Denys Turner, in his study Julian of Norwich: Theologian, argues that no single English word will do; behovely sits in the same conceptual neighborhood as "convenient" in the older sense — that which suits, fits, harmonizes with a larger purpose.¹⁸ Sin, for Julian, is real. It is grievous. But it is not the last word. In some way she cannot fully see, it fits into a story whose ending is well.

Julian is honest about her difficulty. She believes what the Church teaches — that some are damned, that hell is real, that the unbaptized and the unrepentant face condemnation. She does not deny it. But she also reports, with equal honesty, that this is not what God seemed to be showing her. "I saw no hell," she writes at one point, "but as I have said before."¹⁹ She holds the two together. She trusts God to know what she does not.

The second stage of God's answer comes in chapter 32, where the showing of the Great Deed appears. It is one of the most arresting passages in medieval theology:

The Great Deed is what God will do at the last day. It is hidden. Not even the saints in heaven know what it is. It is the deed by which "all shall be made well." Julian does not claim that the Great Deed is universal restoration. She does not name what it is. She says only that what God will do is so far beyond present understanding that the apparent conflict between the Church's teaching and her showings will be reconciled in a way no creature can presently see.²⁰ This is one of the most disciplined pieces of theological humility in the Middle Ages. Julian does not deny hell. She does not affirm universalism. She affirms a divine mystery wider than either position as she knows it, and she trusts the God she has met in the showings of Christ's love to be the same God who will do the Great Deed at the end.

The other passage from Julian that matters for our purposes is her theology of God as Mother. In chapters 58 through 63, Julian unfolds — with a freedom rare in medieval writing — the maternal language of God's care for the creature. Christ is our Mother, she says, who bears us in love, feeds us with himself, picks us up when we fall, and never abandons us. McGinn observes that Julian's motherhood imagery is not sentimental decoration; it is doing real theological work, arguing that the divine relation to the creature is structured by a love that, like a mother's, does not stop when the child falls.²¹

Limbo: A Doctrine in Tension

If the mystics kept the door of mercy open by indirection, the doctrine of limbo cracked the consensus open from the inside. Limbo — from the Latin limbus, "edge" — was the medieval West's attempt to handle a problem Augustine had bequeathed.

Augustine had argued, against the Pelagians, that unbaptized infants who die in original sin cannot enter the kingdom of God. Strictly applied, that meant they suffered the same fate as the damned, though Augustine softened it by speaking of a "mildest punishment." The medieval scholastics found this intolerable. By Aquinas's day the consensus had emerged that unbaptized infants suffer no positive pain at all; they simply lack the beatific vision. They are, as it were, on the edge of hell — limbus infantium.²²

This was a compromise, and an unstable one. If infants are not in heaven, God's love seems limited by the absence of a sacrament. If infants are not in hell, then "the unrighteous" — medieval shorthand for "those who go to hell" — must mean something narrower than the popular preaching suggested. Either way, strict Augustinianism was being quietly bent. Aquinas's mature view was that the souls in limbo enjoy a natural happiness and lack only the supernatural beatitude reserved for the elect. Bonaventure came close to saying the infants might even be glad of what they have. Dante put limbo at the top of his hell, a place of "sospiri" — sighs — but no fire.²³

The point is not to defend limbo as a doctrine. It is to notice what its existence reveals. The supposedly monolithic medieval consensus on hell had a substantial population it could not handle. The compromise wobbled for centuries. In 2007, the Vatican's International Theological Commission, under the authority of Pope Benedict XVI, issued a document entitled The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die Without Being Baptized. It concluded, with notable caution, that there are "serious theological and liturgical grounds for hope that unbaptised infants who die will be saved and enjoy the Beatific Vision," though these are "reasons for prayerful hope, rather than grounds for sure knowledge."²⁴ Limbo, the document affirmed, never had the status of dogma. It was always a "possible theological hypothesis." If the modern Catholic Church can quietly walk back limbo without anyone calling it a denial of the faith, then the medieval consensus was not, after all, the closed system its modern defenders sometimes claim.

D. Reception and Controversy

The Heterodox at the Margins

The Cathars — sometimes called Albigensians — were not, in any sympathetic sense, part of the long-hope tradition. They were dualists, holding that the material world had been created by an evil power and that the human soul's task was to escape the body. The Albigensian Crusade of 1209–1229 crushed the movement militarily, and the Inquisition mopped up the remnants. I mention them not to lend them respectability but to mark a distinction. Universal restoration as understood by Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Isaac of Nineveh, or Julian of Norwich is not Cathar dualism. It is the conviction that the God of Israel and of Jesus Christ — maker of heaven and earth, of soul and body — will, in his own way and time, restore his creation.²⁵

The Spiritual Franciscans were a different story — a wing of the order that took the founder's commitment to absolute poverty so seriously that they clashed with the papal mainstream. Many were drawn to the apocalyptic visions of Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135–1202), whose three-ages theology distinguished the age of the Father, the age of the Son, and a coming age of the Spirit, in which the Gospel would be preached in a wholly new key. Joachim was not directly universalist, but his emphasis on a future, more glorious dispensation of grace gave hope to those who chafed against the rigid eschatology of the schools. Some Joachimite enthusiasts pushed their master's framework into open speculation about the eventual conversion of all peoples.²⁶ The English Wycliffites and Bohemian Hussites of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries also helped pry open the scholastic mainstream — though their challenges were primarily ecclesiological, and we take them up properly in Chapter 15.

The Quiet Eriugenan Stream

One last thread runs underneath the surface of medieval theology. John Scotus Eriugena, the ninth-century Irish-born Carolingian polymath whose Periphyseon we considered in Chapter 11, had been condemned in 1225 by Pope Honorius III, who ordered copies of his great work burned. But Eriugena had also translated the works of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, whose negative-theological vocabulary became indispensable to medieval mysticism. Through those translations, Eriugena's voice continued to reach later theologians even when the Periphyseon itself was not on their desks. McGinn has argued that the Rhineland mystics drank from the Eriugenan-Dionysian stream more than is sometimes acknowledged.²⁷ The condemned Carolingian universalist had a posthumous afterlife in the very mystics this chapter has been tracking.

Julian's Modern Recovery

Most of these voices were marginal in their own time. Julian of Norwich was barely read for centuries; her Long Text survived in a handful of manuscripts. The Rhineland mystics circulated in monastic settings but were not the staple diet of Catholic preaching. The Spiritual Franciscans were suppressed. Joachim's three-ages theology was repeatedly condemned. The Eriugenan stream ran underground.

Their recovery is largely a modern project. Eckhart was rediscovered in the early nineteenth century by German Romantic philosophers and theologians; serious scholarly editions did not begin until the twentieth century. Julian was almost entirely unknown until Serenus de Cressy's 1670 publication of the Long Text and, more decisively, the modern editions of the twentieth century. T. S. Eliot quoted her famously in the last of his Four Quartets, "Little Gidding" (1942), placing her words about sin being behovely at the very crown of the poem's resolution.²⁸ Through Eliot and through retrievals by Thomas Merton, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and others, Julian has become a favorite of modern hopeful universalism. Frederick Bauerschmidt and Denys Turner have both cautioned against a too-easy claim of Julian as a universalist: she is a more disciplined theologian than that. Her "all shall be well" is not a doctrinal proposition but a theological hope grounded in the revealed character of God.²⁹

E. Assessment — What We Can and Cannot Conclude

What did the medieval dissenters actually teach? Here I have to choose my words.

They did not teach universal restoration in the way Origen and Gregory of Nyssa had. They could not. The cost would have been excommunication, condemnation, and silence. Eckhart already paid most of that cost without saying it. To have said it openly in fourteenth-century Cologne would have ended a teaching career, perhaps a life.

What they did was quieter and, in a way, more durable. They kept the question of mercy alive. They built into their devotional and mystical theology a kind of conceptual room — a room with a door not quite closed — through which a wider hope could circulate without being directly named. Julian's Great Deed. Eckhart's divine ground. Tauler's Gelassenheit. The Theologia Germanica's insistence that the soul is for God and God for the soul. None of these is a formal doctrine of apokatastasis. All of them are stubborn refusals to say less about the love of God than they had been given to say.

The limbo doctrine tells a parallel story. The medieval Latin West could not bring itself to consign unbaptized infants to the same fate as the damned. The compromise was inelegant, unstable, and has now been quietly walked back by the modern magisterium. The dominant doctrine had limits the dominant doctors themselves recognized. They were willing to bend the edges of strict Augustinianism rather than follow it where it would have led.

If we are asking, "Did the medieval Latin West teach universalism?" — the answer is no, with rare exceptions. If we are asking, "Did the medieval Latin West teach a single, monolithic doctrine of eternal hell from which no significant voice dissented?" — the answer is also no. The truth is harder. The dominant doctrine was strong, but the long hope kept finding ways to surface. In the mystics it surfaced as a hope deeper than doctrine could fully express. In the limbo debate it surfaced as the embarrassment of a compromise that did not quite work. In the heterodox margins it surfaced in shapes the mainstream could not always assimilate. And Julian of Norwich, in her tiny cell, sat with the question for twenty years and would not let it go. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, one of the most theologically serious things a Christian can do.

F. Why This Matters

The popular evangelical caricature of medieval Christianity is of a thousand years of unrelieved Augustinian consensus, broken only by the Reformation. On this picture, the long hope pops up in Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, gets buried by Augustine, and stays buried until the modern denials of hell get going in the nineteenth century. Anyone who thinks otherwise is reading modernity back into the past.

The record does not support that caricature. The medieval West did have a dominant doctrine. But it also had Eckhart and Tauler and Suso. It had the anonymous author of the Theologia Germanica, whom Luther would later edit and praise. It had Julian of Norwich. It had the limbo debate. It had the Spiritual Franciscans and the Joachimites. It had the quietly circulating texts of Eriugena. The dominant doctrine never finally closed the question of mercy, because the Spirit kept stirring up voices that refused to let it close.

For the conditionalist and the postmortem-opportunity advocate alike, the medieval dissenters offer a model. They show that one can be a thoroughly orthodox Christian, deeply formed by the Church's teaching and sacraments, and still hold open the question of how wide God's mercy will finally prove to be. Julian's final words, as she lays down her pen at the end of the Long Text, are as good a summary of the long hope as the medievals ever produced. After more than fifteen years of brooding over the showings, she writes: "And from the time that it was showed I desired oftentimes to learn what was our Lord's meaning. And fifteen years after and more, I was answered in spiritual understanding, saying thus: 'What, wouldst thou learn thy Lord's meaning in this thing? Learn it well: Love was His meaning.'"³⁰

The medieval centuries did not lose the long hope. They carried it, mostly underground, in the voices of those who refused to say less about love than they had been shown. The Reformation would arrive next and reopen the great questions. In the next chapter we will see how Luther and Calvin handled the inheritance — and where the Reformation, on the question of postmortem hope, was a hardening rather than a recovery.