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Dr. Carol Zaleski's
Research of Medieval Near-Death Experiences
Dr.
Carol Zaleski is the author of the NDE
classic
Otherworld
Journeys: Accounts of Near-Death Experiences
in Medieval and Modern Times
for which the New York Times had to say,
"Zaleski ... has had the excellent idea of
putting recent near-death narratives in
perspective by comparing them with those of
an earlier period ... An extremely
interesting piece of work, and one that
offers many shrewd insights." Dr. Zaleski is
also the author of
The Life of the
World to Come: Near-Death Experience and
Christian Hope
which draws relationships between the
narratives of near-death experiences and the
traditional Christian doctrines of hope and
the afterlife. It asks the question, "Are we
rationally and morally entitled to believe
in life after death?" and answers with a
spirited and emphatic "yes." Dr. Zaleski is
also an editor with
The Christian
Century Magazine
and together with her husband,
Philip Zaleski
(editor of
Parabola
magazine
and The Best Spiritual Writing series),
have authored
The Book of
Heaven: An Anthology of Writings from
Ancient to Modern Times.
The Zaleskis provide the first wide-ranging
anthology of writings about heaven, drawing
from scriptures, myths, epics, poems,
prayers, sermons, novels, hymns and spells,
to illuminate a vast spectrum of beliefs
about the world beyond. The Zaleskis are
currently working on a book about prayer in
world religions.
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1. The Otherworld
Journey as Miracle Story
The Dialogues of
Gregory the Great
Moving
beyond early Christian ,precedents, our next
stop en route to the medieval other world is
with
Gregory the Great,
the sixth-century pope and spiritual writer
whose
Dialogues
helped to set the standards for medieval
discussion of miracles and visions.[5]
A collection of entertaining and edifying
wonder-tales, the Dialogues attempt to
demonstrate, in the face of epidemics,
Lombard invasions, and schism, that a
providential order underlies events and that
the age of great saints and signs from
heaven has not passed. The fourth and final
book of the Dialogues is
devoted to "last
things"; here Gregory offers "proofs" of the
soul's immortality and demonstrates --
through an assortment of deathbed visions,
ghostly apparitions, and eyewitness accounts
of the other world-the reality of postmortem
punishment and the efficacy of masses and
pious works on behalf of the dead.
Of the forty-two
anecdotes in book 4, three held a special
fascination for medieval readers. The first
concerns a hermit who revived from death and
testified that he had been to hell, where he
saw several powerful men dangling in fire.
Just as he too was being dragged into the
flames, an angel in a shining garment came
to his rescue and sent him back to life with
the words (echoed in several medieval
visions): "leave, and consider
carefully how you will live from now on."
After his return
to life, the hermit's fasts and vigils bore
witness, Gregory tells us, that he had
indeed seen the terrors of hell; this too
would become a common formula for the
transforming effects of an otherworld
journey.[6]
A second
memorable tale of return from death came to
Gregory firsthand, from a prominent
businessman named Stephen, who died while on
a trip to Constantinople.[7] Stephen
confessed to Gregory that he had never
believed the stories about hell and
punishment but that his brief visit to the
infernal court had changed his mind.
Fortunately for him, the judge sent him
back, saying: "I ordered Stephen the
blacksmith to be brought here, not this
man."
Webmaster
note:
This kind of "clerical error" in a NDE also
appears also in
Hindu NDEs.
Stephen regained
consciousness immediately, and his testimony
was confirmed by the death, in that very
hour, of a blacksmith of the same name.
Although this story clearly belongs to the
common stock of tales of death by mistaken
identity, Gregory insists that such apparent
mix-ups occur "not as an error, but as a
warning."[8] Gregory here shows his
genius for adapting such material to his own
didactic purpose; without significantly
changing the story, he introduces a
providential element, thereby transferring
it from the realm of folklore to that of
religious instruction. His example would be
followed closely by later generations of
otherworld journey narrators.
The most
influential of Gregory's anecdotes of return
from death is the story of a soldier who
died and lived, and whose visionary
testimony sheds additional light on the
destiny of Stephen the businessman. The
reverberations of this account in medieval
vision literature will be discussed in
Chapter 4 below; because it is such an
important source, I translate it here in
full:
"Three years
ago, as you know, this same Stephen
died in the virulent plague which
devastated this city [Rome], in
which arrows were seen coming down
from the sky and striking people
dead. A certain soldier in this city
of ours happened to be struck down.
He was drawn out of his body and lay
lifeless, but he soon returned [to
life] and described what befell him.
At that time there were many people
experiencing these things. He said
that there was a bridge, under which
ran a black, gloomy river which
breathed forth an intolerably
foul-smelling vapor. But across the
bridge there were delightful meadows
carpeted with green grass and
sweet-smelling flowers. The meadows
seemed to be meeting places for
people clothed in white. Such a
pleasant odor filled the air that
the sweet smell by itself was enough
to satisfy [the hunger of] the
inhabitants who were strolling
there. In that place each one had
his own separate dwelling, filled
with magnificent light. A house of
amazing capacity was being
constructed there, apparently out of
golden bricks, but he could not find
out for whom it might be. On the
bank of the river there were
dwellings, some of which were
contaminated by the foul vapor that
rose up from the river, but others
were not touched at all.
On
the bridge there was a test. If any
unjust person wished to cross, he
slipped and fell into the dark and
stinking water. But the just, who
were not blocked by guilt, freely
and easily made their way across to
the region of delight. He revealed
that he saw Peter, an elder of the
ecclesiastical family, who died four
years ago; he lay in the horrible
slime underneath the bridge, weighed
down by an enormous iron chain. When
he asked why this should be, [the
soldier] was given an answer that
called to our minds exactly what we
know of this man's deeds. He was
told, "he suffers these things
because whenever he was ordered to
punish someone he used to inflict
blows more out of a love of cruelty
than out of obedience." No one who
knew him is unaware that he behaved
this way.
He also
saw a certain pilgrim priest
approach the bridge and cross it
with as much self-command in his
walk as there was sincerity in his
life. On the same bridge, he claimed
to have recognized that Stephen of
whom we spoke before.[9] In his
attempt to cross the bridge,
Stephen's foot slipped, and the
lower half of his body was now
dangling off the bridge. Some
hideous men came up from the river
and grabbed him by the hips to pull
him down. At the same time, some
very splendid men dressed in white
began to pull him up by the arms.
While the struggle went on, with
good spirits pulling him up and evil
spirits dragging him down, the one
who was watching all this was sent
back to his body. So he never
learned the outcome of the struggle.
What
happened to Stephen can, however, be
explained in terms of his life. For
in him the evils of the flesh
contended with the good work of
almsgiving. Since he was dragged
down by the hips and pulled up by
the arms, it is plain to see that he
loved almsgiving and yet did not
refrain completely from the carnal
vices that were dragging him down.
Which side was victorious in that
contest was concealed from our
eyewitness, and is no more plain to
us than to the one who saw it all
and then came back to life. Still,
it is certain that even though
Stephen had been to hell and back,
as we related above, he did not
completely correct his life.
Consequently, when he went out of
his body many years later, he still
had to face a life-and-death
battle.[10]
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Compressed into
this brief vision story are several motifs
that recur throughout medieval otherworld
journey literature: the river of hell, the
flowery meadows of paradise, the
white-clothed throngs in heaven, the test
bridge, and, above all, the externalization
of deeds. Gregory makes it plain that the
vision should be understood symbolically:
the real meaning of the house built with
bricks of gold is that those who give alms
generously are constructing their eternal
abodes in heaven; and the houses blackened
by foul vapors were prefabricated, he
implies, by the unsavory deeds of those
destined to dwell in them. It was thanks
largely to this widely read account that the
bridge -- as the setting for a psychomachia
or symbolic confrontation with deeds --
became such a prominent feature of the
medieval otherworld landscape.
The anecdotes in
Book 4 of Gregory's
Dialogues mark a turning point in the
history of Western otherworld journey
narration. Even more than the
Vision of St.
Paul,
Gregory's vision stories focus on the
interim period between death and
resurrection. This does not mean that
apocalyptic eschatology had relaxed its grip
on the imagination of sixth-century
Christians; Gregory speaks with urgency
about the approach of Doomsday and suggests
that otherworld visions are on the rise
because the world to come is drawing near
and mixing its light with the darkness of
the present age.[11]
In the Dialogues, however, Gregory is
concerned with the eschatological crisis
that begins with the hour of death; he seems
to find more edification in contemplating
the purgatorial or punitive torments that
await the average sinner than in making
apocalyptic predictions about the
experiences that will befall the human race
in its last days.[12]
Gregory also
departs from the classic apocalyptic model
of otherworld journey narration in that the
visions he relates come from relatives,
neighbors and fellow monks, rather than from
remote biblical heroes. These are cautionary
rather than dramatically revelatory tales;
the protagonists are either sinners who
revive only long enough to warn the rest of
us about the penalties awaiting
transgressors, or penitents mercifully sent
back to amend their own lives. For this
reason, Gregory's visionary anecdotes cannot
lay claim to the prestige that attaches to
pseudepigraphic
works.
But Gregory compensates for the absence of
exalted credentials by offering
corroborating details; almost like a
psychical researcher, he interviews
witnesses, provides' character references,
and sets each story in familiar locales that
will inspire his audience's trust; wherever
possible, he cites circumstantial evidence
such as the confirmation of Stephen's vision
by the death of Stephen the blacksmith.
Indeed, it was partly through Gregory's
influence that empirical verification became
a hallmark of the medieval otherworld
vision.
2. The Otherworld
Journey as Conversion
The Vision of
Drythelm
While
Gregory could be described as father to
the whole family of medieval Christian
otherworld journey tales, his influence
is especially marked in what I call the
Drythelm line, a literary tradition that
can be traced back to the
Vision of
Drythelm
related by the eighth-century
Anglo-Saxon monk and scholar
Bede
in his
Ecclesiastical History of the English
People.[13]
As Bede informs us, Drythelm was a pious
Northumbrian family man who died one
evening after a severe illness but
revived the next day at dawn, terrifying
his mourners by sitting up abruptly on
his deathbed. He related what he had
seen in the other world to his wife, and
later to a monk who repeated the story
to Bede.
Though
similar in many respects to the
narratives we have already considered,
the Vision of Drythelm is far more
developed as a journey and gives a
fuller account of otherworld topography,
even foreshadowing the purgatorial
landscapes of the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries. It therefore serves well as
an introduction to the medieval form of
the otherworld vision. At the beginning
of the story, Drythelm meets a man
"of shining countenance and bright
apparel" who escorts him to an
enormous valley, one side of which roars
with flames while the other rages with
hail and snow.[14] Countless misshapen
souls are tossed to and fro between fire
and ice. Appearances suggest that this
is hell, but Drythelm's guide explains
that it is a place of temporary
torments, reserved for deathbed
penitents who can be released from their
punishments by masses, prayers, alms,
and fasts performed by the living on
their behalf.
To reach the
mouth of hell, the two travel through a
land of darkness, in which Drythelm can
make his way only by keeping his eyes
fixed on the bright silhouette of his
guide. Hell is a bottomless, stinking
pit. From it leap tongues of fire
(in diabolic parody of Pentecost,
perhaps) on which damned souls are
cast upward like sparks only to fall
back again amidst mingled sounds of
laughter and lament. Drythelm sees
malign spirits dragging the unhappy
souls of a priest, a layman, and a woman
into the abyss. The demons threaten
Drythelm with their tongs, but are put
to flight by his guide, who appears just
in time in the form of a bright star.
They travel
southeast to a realm of clear light,
where they encounter a vast wall.
Suddenly they are on top of the wall, in
a bright, flowery meadow. Here Drythelm
meets "many companies of happy
people" and supposes that he is in
heaven, but learns that it is only an
antechamber for the not quite perfect.
As he approaches the kingdom of heaven,
he hears sweet singing and enjoys a
fragrance and light even more glorious
than before. Despite his longing to
remain, Drythelm is dispatched back to
his body, with the promise that a life
of vigilance will eventually win him a
place among the blissful spirits. Upon
revival, he tells his astonished wife:
"Do not be afraid, for I have truly
risen from the death by which I was held
fast, and have been permitted to live
again among men; nevertheless, from now
on I must live not according to my old
habits, but in a much different manner."
Accordingly,
he distributes his property, retires to
a Benedictine monastery, and takes up a
life of austerity and devotion, fasting,
and cold baths.
For Bede, the
most impressive part of Drythelm's story
is its ending; like Gregory, Bede holds
that "it is a greater miracle to
convert a sinner than to raise up a dead
man."[16] And it is a greater
miracle yet if the tale of a dead man's
recovery and spiritual transformation
changes the hearts of its hearers; these
authors value the otherworld journey
narrative primarily for its power as a
model for conversion and its usefulness
in advertising the cause of particular
religious institutions and ideas.
Whatever role Drythelm may have played
in the development of the narrative,
Bede's account of the vision can be read
as a manifesto for Benedictine
monasticism, ascetic discipline, and
intercessory masses for the dead. The
vision also reflects the eschatology of
the Anglo-Saxon church of Bede's time;
by intimating a purgatorial state
distinct from hell, it departs from
earlier Celtic Christian traditions and
conforms to the orthodoxy of Rome.[17]
All of these
features recommended the Vision of
Drythelm to Anglo-Saxon spiritual
writers and homilists of the ninth to
eleventh centuries, who faithfully
retold or creatively embroidered the
return-from-death stories related by
Gregory and Bede and whose endorsement
contributed to the success of visions of
the Drythelm line. The full flowering of
this tradition, however, occurred in the
period from the tenth to the
mid-thirteenth centuries, which saw both
the development of long; almost
novelistic accounts of journey to the
beyond and back, and increasing mention
of otherworld visions in chronicles,
sermons, and books of exempla for
preachers. During that time, the
otherworld journey found favor with
monastic and clerical authors as a way
of expressing their views on penance,
intercession, and religious vows. It
also played a part in what Jacques Le
Goff calls the "spatialization"
of purgatory, which went hand in hand
with standardization of the rites by
which the living purged their faults,
prepared for death, and petitioned for
the welfare of their departed kin.[18]
Despite such
changes in its social function and
eschatological content, however, in many
respects the return-home-death story
remained the same, preserved by literary
imitation, by the pious conservation of
traditional forms of expression, and by
the universality of its themes. Thus it
is possible to make some generalizations
about the Christian otherworld journey
to identify groups or types that cut
across regional boundaries and persist
throughout the long centuries that we
loosely call the Middle Ages.
Part
II of this book will pay special
attention to a group of long narratives
from the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries that follow the Drythelm
pattern of death, revival, and
conversion. Among them are the
visions of
Adamnan,
Alberic, the
Boy William,
Tundal, and the Knight Owen (St.
Patrick's Purgatory).
Although they depend on sources shared
by all medieval otherworld journey
narratives
(the Bible, apocalypses, legends of
martyrs and desert saints, Gregory's
Dialogues, and classical works such as
Vergil's
Aeneid
and
Plutarch's
Moralia),
the narratives in this group display a
remarkable similarity in their choice of
which set phrases and images to borrow.
Typically the visionary is told, after
viewing purgatorial torments and
mistaking them for the punishments of
the damned, that there are far worse
sights to come
(Drythelm, Tundal, Owen);
he sees souls tossed between fire and
ice
(Thespesius, Drythelm, Tundal)
and rising like sparks horn the pit of
hell
(Drythelm, Alberic, the Boy William,
Tundal);
he is temporarily deserted by his guide
(Thespesius, Drythelm, the Boy William,
Tundal);
he finds paradise surrounded by or on
top of a wall, which he surmounts
without knowing how
(Drythelm, Adamnan, Alberic, the Boy
William, Tundal, Owen);
at the end, after a brief taste of
heavenly joys, he is compelled against
his will to return to life
(Drythelm, Tundal);
and after he revives, his newly austere
mode of life testifies to the
authenticity of his vision
(Drythelm, Alberic, and Tundal borrow
Gregory's phrasing for this).
In addition, the test-bridge, whose
history will be discussed in Chapter 4,
recurs with many similarities in the
visions of Adamnan, Alberic, Tundal, and
Owen.
These and other
parallels suggest the presence of a
literary tradition that is at least
partly deliberate in its conformities.
Yet the "Drythelm line" is far
from an exact designation. One cannot
determine the sequence of literary
transmission or discover its causal
mechanism merely by arranging similar
narratives in chronological order.[19]
Nor would such a linear history of
motifs do justice to the complexities of
interpretation. Each text has a unique
functional significance within its
particular social milieu. Beyond that,
it seems likely that at least some of
these narratives reflect actual
experience and as such cannot be reduced
to a matter of mechanical literary
dependence; I will have much more to say
in future chapters concerning the
experiential basis of vision literature.
3.
References
[5] My
translations from this work are based on
the Latin edition by Umberto Moricca. An
English version, by
Odo John
Zimmerman,
is available in the Fathers of the
Church series.
[6]
Dialogues 4:37
[7]
Ibid.
[8]
Evidence for the universality of lore
concerning death by mistaken identity
can be found in Stith Thompson's
Motif Index,
vol. 3, F0-F199. In our own day, the
story has come to life on the screen in
"Here
Comes Mr. Jordan"
and "Heaven
Can Wait."
[9]
Stephen who died and revived, not
Stephen the blacksmith
[10]
Dialogues
4:38.
[11]
Dialogues 4:43.
[12]
On Gregory's eschatology, see Milton M.
Gatch, "The
Fourth Dialogue of Gregory the Great:
Some Problems of Interpretation."
[13]
I am using the dual-language edition by
Bertram
Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors,
but supplying my own translations of the
Latin text.
[14]
Bede's
Ecclesiastical History,
ed. Colgrave and Mynors, p. 488.
[15]
Ibid., p. 488.
[16]
In the Dialogues; quoted by Benedicta
Ward, "Miracles and History," in
Famulus
Christi,
ed. Gerald Bonner (London, 1976), pp.
70-76.
[17]
See St. John D. Seymour,
Irish Visions
of the Other World
and "The
Eschatology of the Early Irish Church."
On Anglo-Saxon eschatology, see Milton
M. Gatch,
Preaching and
Theology in Anglo-Saxon England:
Aelfric and Wulfstan (Toronto and
Buffalo, 1977). On the difference
between a purgatorial state and
purgatory as a place, see Jacques Le
Goff,
The Birth of
Purgatory.
[18]
See The Birth of Purgatory, p. 228.
[19]
In
Tours of Hell,
Martha Himmelfarb points out that
studies of apocalyptic literature early
in this century were flawed by the
assumption that the chronology of known
texts is equivalent to the history of a
literary tradition; Himmelfarb maintains
that this fallacy helped to support a
habitual overemphasis on classical
precedents for the motif of visits to
hell.
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Books
by
Carol
and Philip Zaleski
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Otherworld Journeys:
Accounts of Near-Death
Experience in Medieval and
Modern Times
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by Carol Zaleski
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This is one of the most
comprehensive treatment to
date of the evidence
surrounding near-death
experiences. Zaleski
identifies universal as well
as culturally specific
features by comparing
near-death narratives in two
distinct periods of Western
society: medieval
Christendom and
twentieth-century secular
America. This comparison
reveals profound
similarities, such as the
life-review and the
transforming after-effects
of the experience, as well
as striking contrasts, such
as the absence of hell or
punishment scenes from
modern accounts.
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The Book of Heaven: An Anthology of
Writings from Ancient to Modern
Times
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by Carol Zaleski, Philip Zaleski
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In medievel times, heaven belonged
to the theologians and priests.
Sacred writings such as the Bible,
the
Tibetan Book of the Dead, and
ancient Greco-Roman myths have
attempted to describe what happens
after death. But medievel artists
and literati have also shaped our
picture of heaven. The Zaleskis draw
on all these traditions to bring to
the reader a delightful collection
of descriptions of the hereafter.
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The Life of the World to Come:
Near-Death Experience and Christian
Hope
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by Carol Zaleski
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In these graceful meditations,
Zaleski searches for the affinities
between narratives of NDEs and the
traditional Christian doctrines of
hope and the afterlife. She explores
the ways that NDEs may be understood
as awakenings to the reality of
death and concludes that traditional
Christian images of the afterlife
may be greatly enriched by an
encounter with the images of
afterlife offered in NDE accounts.
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The Best of Spiritual
Writing 2002
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by Philip Zaleski
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The Zaleski's collection of
spiritual writings include
contributions from
Christian, Muslim, Jewish,
secular and pan-Hindu
perspectives, and various
pieces that deal with
spirituality as it impacts
the environment,
relationships, politics,
creativity and literature.
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The Best of Spiritual Writing 2000
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by Philip Zaleski
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The Zaleski's collection features
essays, poems and a few
genre-defying pieces that were
originally published not only in
religious periodicals, but also in
literary journals and magazines such
as Atlantic Monthly and Salon. While
the spiritual orientations of the
writers vary widely, certain
unifying themes, such as death and a
love of the outdoors, emerge.
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The Best of Spiritual Writing 1999
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by Philip Zaleski
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This edifying, well-chosen
collection of essays and poems are
diverse in form and subject but have
a common function, as Zaleski states
in his preface, to "tell us
something about truth, beauty, and
goodness ... about how to live the
good life."
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The Best of Spiritual Writing 1998
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by Philip Zaleski
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The Zaleski's collection satisfies
the appetite for sustenance in this
smorgasbord of tantalizing spiritual
morsels. Collected here are 38
essays and poems drawn from 23
different periodicals, as well as
some pieces published here for the
first time. Zaleski's keen eye for
high-quality spiritual writing makes
this a significant addition to the
spiritual literature of our time.
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