“Our Lord God wishes us to be merchants of a kind,” Augustine explained. Giving alms to the poor was like a merchant’s traiecticium, an investment whose trajectory landed invisibly but profitably. Almsgiving was also essential socially. The poor flooded the churches, changing almsgiving from a proof of solidarity with “brothers” to a purchase of social peace from “others”. Instead of a leisured “waiting room”, the expanded afterlife resembled a “modern city marathon”. An elite pack of saints broke away from the field; the toiling, suffering masses staggered onwards; a cohort of sinners that never passed the starting line. The masses, caught between the inarguably saintly and the irredeemably sinful, were the non valde boni and the non valde mali, the “not wholly good” and the “not wholly bad”. Churchmen coached the souls of the masses towards the finishing line.
Brown traces the origins of transactional ideas in religion to the monetisation of the ancient economy in the sixth century BC. But it might be a perennially human impulse. Existential urgency, and a remaking of “metaphors to live by” are reliable symptoms of political and social crisis. Abraham negotiates with God over the punishment of Sodom; Moses negotiates after the Israelites have dallied with the Golden Calf. After 476 AD and the end of the Roman Empire in the west, Augustine’s theology of “penitential piety” became the bridge that linked the Roman Empire to the Latin kingdoms of medieval Europe.
By 650 AD, Catholics had turned the old bond between the living and the dead into a discrete sphere, a “twilight zone” of the soul. In Gaul, the nobility adopted a “half-ascetic courtly lifestyle” and subsidised the monasteries. Monetised, prayer was outsourced to factories of intercession. The bishops became the bouncers of God’s nightclub, The Eye of the Needle, where the party never stopped for the kings who inherited Constantine’s idea of Christian monarchy. The masses, in life and death, were outside in the cold, strugglers in an elaborate hierarchy.
For Pope Gregory the Great (590-604), dreams and visions showed the misty outlines of the “grey zone” between death and heaven; as if, Brown says, the afterlife were “bathed in the soft dawn of the end of time”. This dawn was also a sunset, the “end of time” not just for Roman civilisation, but also for a “very ancient view of the world”: late antiquity, indeed.
