Draft:Death in Byzantine Empire

In the Byzantine Empire, death was generally avoided being mentioned directly, preferring to use various euphemisms such as "separation," "leaving," "paying off debts." Byzantine thanatological conceptions go back to ancient philosophy, which presented death as the separation of the soul from the body. In line with Christian eschatology, it was assumed that this separation was temporary and that the soul would be reunited with the body at the end of time. The Byzantines believed that death occurred at the command of God, who sent an angel to carry out his will. There were differing opinions as to whether the hour of death was predetermined, but it was believed that only the saints could know it in advance. The posthumous existence began with the naked and helpless soul coming out of the body through the mouth to be accompanied by an angel to begin a forty-day wandering, passing through publicans, during which the demons weigh its sins. At the end of the journey, the soul sees Hell and Heaven as a possible waiting place for the Last Judgment. The doctrine of the transmigration of souls was completely denied in Byzantium. As in the philosophy of Neoplatonism, Eastern Christianity views death as a release for new life, and the Church Fathers Basil the Great and John Chrysostom disapproved of excessive mourning for the dead.

Byzantine death and burial rites and ideas about the afterlife are largely based on pre-Christian ideas and customs. The pagan belief in a journey of the soul before death, for which some material aids and an attendant —the psychopomp— are necessary, underwent an outward transformation among early Christian theologians. The role of the psychopomp began to be played by angels, and the viaticum given to the dead by the sacrament of anointing with oil. Many Byzantines underwent pre-mortem tonsure in the hope of increasing their chances of salvation. The custom of preparing a special memorial meal also stems from the pagan tradition of a meal by relatives at the grave of the deceased. It was rejected as a prejudice in the West, but preserved in the Byzantine Church. Kolivo was to be distributed on certain days after death (the 3rd, 7th or 9th, 30th or 40th), along with the recitation of appropriate prayers, because it was believed that during these days the soul passed through significant stages on its way to God. The deceased were also commemorated on the anniversary of their death and on the Sunday before the week of the Last Judgment. The Byzantines believed that the fate of the soul could be influenced by prayers and donations to churches and monasteries.

Life after death in Byzantium

The Byzantines certainly believed that death was not the end. At the same time, they believed that the existence of the soul outside the body was a matter of mystical experience rather than theological study[1]. Most early Christian writers agreed that death consisted in the separation of the conscious soul from the material body, and believers hoped to await the end of the world in a comfortable place, "Abraham's bosom" or something like that, and then to rise in the flesh and see the triumph of Christ. The position of the Byzantine Church on eschatological issues was in line with Orthodox dogma and left little room for interpretation. The Nicene-Chalcedonian Creed contained the dogma of the expectation of the resurrection from the dead and the future life. Christian theologians from Hippolytus of Rome (II-III centuries) believed that the resurrection would be physical, not spiritual. In the eighth century, one of the Church Fathers, John Damascene, in his "Sacred Parallels", in the chapter "On the Time of Death", asserted that souls wait in the afterlife for the time determined by God, when all will be resurrected, but not by incarnation of souls, but bodily[2]. Because of local peculiarities, the question of the bodily resurrection was given considerable attention in Egypt. Despite the condemnation of the custom of mummification by such prominent theologians as Shenoute and Augustine of Hippo, many Egyptians wished to preserve their bodies in a secure tomb for the greater assurance of resurrection[3].

In the absence of precise dogmatic definitions, the Byzantines showed considerable concern about the exact form of bodily resurrection and whether relatives and friends would be able to recognize each other afterward. The problem of "recognizing soul mates" (Greek κοινος αναγνωρισμος) arose as a reaction to dualistic teachings that downplayed the role of the material world[comment 1]. In Byzantium, with the essentially material character of its liturgical traditions, including iconoclasm, the view of the continuity of material existence after death and before the resurrection prevailed. The seventh-century theologian Andrew of Caesarea called nonsense the idea that the resurrected body would be deprived of its organs, through which man glorified God in life, and of its sexuality. At the end of the eighth century, "angelic" and unrecognizable resurrected bodies were condemned by the monk Theodore the Studite as the heresy of Origen. A different answer to the same question was given in the XII century by the historian and theologian Michael Glika. In his opinion, the lifelong separation of the sexes was the result of the loss of the primary sexless "angelic" state, to which one must eventually return[5].

With the end of the Dark Ages and the revival of interest in ancient philosophical theories, Byzantine thinkers began to take an interest in the problem of the transmigration of souls as an object of criticism. In the second half of the 9th century, Patriarch Photius refuted the teachings of the Neoplatonist Hierocles of Alexandria, who associated the soul with divine predestination[6]. The views on metempsychosis of the philosopher John Italus, condemned by the Church in 1082, can only be roughly reconstructed. The corresponding anathematism was included in the Orthodox Synodic and was directed against those who "prefer the so-called wisdom of the foolish outward philosophers and follow their teachers and accept the reincarnation of human souls, or that they perish like wordless animals and go into nothingness, and consequently deny the resurrection, the judgment, and the final reward of life"[7][2]. As the Synod commentator J. Guillard points out, the anathema in such a formulation contains an obvious contradiction, since the Platonic doctrine of the transmigration of souls is incompatible with the Aristotelian theory of the destruction of the soul after death. Accordingly, it is impossible to accuse anyone of holding both approaches. According to Périclès-Pierre Joannou, Italus actually proved by logical arguments that the soul, although it continues to exist after death, does not continue its development indefinitely, but is limited by God's judgment of itself. Italus' theory was an attempt to correct Gregory of Nyssa's doctrine of the soul's infinite movement toward union with God, which the philosopher considered not to follow from the assumption of the finiteness of the time of divine judgment[8].

In the later period, the idea of the transmigration of souls apparently ceased to interest educated Byzantines, with the sole exception of the 15th-century philosopher Gemistos Plifon[9]. The last time Byzantine theologians turned to the subject of the afterlife was as a result of disputes with Catholics at the Council of Ferraro-Florence in 1438-1439. Bishop Mark of Ephesus, a participant in the disputes with the Latins about purgatory, formulated the position of the Byzantine Church as follows: there are three categories of souls, the first of which are in Hades and have no chance of salvation, others who have already received divine grace, i.e. the saints, and others who are in the middle. The latter are the "intermediate" people who died in the Christian faith, but with minor sins for which they have not had time to repent, or with major sins for which they have repented, but have not had time to manifest the "fruits of contrition"[10].

Evolution of ideas about the fate of the soul

Origins of the doctrine of posthumous retribution

According to the German Byzantinist Hans-Georg Beck, the ideas about the afterlife are the best way to understand the religiously conditioned mentality of the Byzantines [11]. The theme of the afterlife is reflected mainly in literature of a religious character—hagiographies, sermons, and liturgical manuals. The latter are relatively few, including Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (VI century) and Simeon of Solun (XV century) [12]. Since the early 1980s, studies of Byzantine “moral” apocalypses, which for a number of reasons had not previously received serious attention, have intensified [comment 2]. On the one hand, among scholars of Byzantine literature, the idea of these works as a “low genre” prevailed; on the other hand, the extremely extensive manuscript tradition did not allow for a canonical edition of the texts. The breakthrough was Eveline Patlagean's article “Byzance et son autre monde. Observations sur quelques récits” (1981), which showed for the first time the importance of apocryphal, including apocalyptic, texts for understanding the religious culture of the time [14]. The doubts that arise as to whether religious literature reflects the mentality of the broader society and not only the concepts of individual theologians, Beck proposes to solve by turning to texts that, in his opinion, reflect the eschatological ideas of the masses. Accordingly, he based his analysis on descriptions in the 10th-century epic Digenis Acritus [15].

Many elements of Christian ideas about the afterlife, such as private judgment, purgatory as an intermediate state of the soul awaiting the Last Judgment, and the hope for the reward of vice and virtue, go back to the Jewish apocalyptic tradition [16]. The most important text here is the Book of Enoch, in the oldest part of which—dating from the 3rd century BCE, the “Book of the Guardians”—provides a description of the temporary holding places for souls awaiting judgment. According to the book, the souls are kept in four deep cavities (Dr.-Greek κοιλώματα), divided according to the degree of righteousness. The possibility of such a division presupposes a prior classification of the dead; that is, it may be regarded as a kind of private judgment. The Book of Enoch also describes a fiery prison for fallen angels and a valley for the eternally damned, later transformed into the Christian hell [16]. In the Apocalypse of Sophonias, the idea of a private judgment is set forth in more detail. Compiled in Egypt at the turn of the first millennium, the text tells of a vision in which the prophet Sophonias was shown angels recording in scrolls the good and evil deeds of people. Depending on which deeds outweigh, the soul is sent either to the righteous or to Gades [17]. The Old Testament apocalypses were known not only to early Christian authors but also much later in Byzantium. Extracts from the Book of Enoch are cited in his chronicle by George Syncellus, and the Apocalypse of Sophonias was used in his historical work by Patriarch Nicephorus (d. 828) [17].

The Apocalypse of Paul, dating from the 3rd–4th centuries and based on both the Jewish tradition and the earlier Apocalypse of Peter, paints a comprehensive picture of the afterlife reward for sins and righteousness. It survives in several editions, and the more elaborate Latin one includes all the elements that later became canonical: the appearance after death of a gloomy and a cheerful angel, showing the deceased his deeds; the angel's movement of the soul through the afterlife and showing various scenes along the way; the presence of the soul before God for judgment; hell as a place for the punishment of sinners; and various pleasing areas for the accommodation of the righteous. It also appears from the Apocalypse that a person's fate is predetermined on their deathbed when either a gloomy or cheerful angel appears to them, or even predetermined earlier, as the names of the righteous are inscribed on tables before the gates of paradise. The extent to which the Byzantines were familiar with Paul's Apocalypse is not well understood, but two texts popular in the Middle Byzantine period, the Apocalypse of the Theotokos and the Apocalypse of Anastasius [18], were based on it. Their peculiarity, which for a long time hindered scientific study, is the absence of canonical variants of the text. Numerous editions of these apocalypses contain significant differences in the descriptions of the afterlife and in the list of sins to be punished [19].

Private trial

Scenes of the Last Judgment are a common motif in temple decoration, and in hagiographic literature, scenes of the meeting of the soul separated from the body with its lifetime thoughts, words, and deeds are frequently depicted. Critical rethinking and analysis of deeds in hagiographic literature were often described as punishment carried out by evil demons following a court session in which the role of lawyers was played by angels [20]. The court passed judgment, and it was implied that this judgment could be influenced not only in life but also after death. Such beliefs were never endorsed by the Church of Byzantium, which had no equivalent to the doctrine of purgatory adopted in the West [21]. Unlike the Last Judgment, during which the fate of all people is to be decided, private judgment concerned the fate of an individual and took place immediately after death. In Orthodox eschatology, it was assumed that after this judgment, the souls of the righteous and sinners reside in paradise and hell, respectively, achieving neither perfect bliss nor perfect torment [22]. Considered in historical context, the Byzantines' preoccupation with life after death functioned as a kind of collective, societal epistemology; that is, it was a means of self-definition, shaping, and expressing the community's image of itself. During political crisis, for example, interest in resurrection could express the hope of revival and restoration of national life [23].

During Late Antiquity, there was a wide range of views regarding the private judgment, but most can be assigned to one of two categories in terms of localizing the main events: either on the deathbed or after the ascension. The “aerial” scenario is first encountered in the third century by Origen, who interpreted Jn. 14:30 as an indication of the existence of demons checking at the border of the world to see if the soul has anything belonging to them. The Greek word τελώνας used by the theologian had the meaning of a tax collector, thus referring to realities well known from everyday life. In such terminology, the demons were understood as publicans, and the places of communion with them as publicans. Significant similarities in Origen's version and Paul's Apocalypse point to the existence of an older tradition, possibly of Egyptian origin. Various details about the aerial judgment are given in the life of the 7th-century Alexandrian patriarch John the Merciful, who, according to his biographer, liked to talk about the soul leaving the body during periods of famine or plague. To those who came to him with a proud look, John told them about the taxation, bringing them to tears [24]. The Apocalypse of Paul also contains a description of a kind of judgment at the bedside of the dying, but without details. In the life of John the Merciful, there is a story about the weighing of the deeds of a dying tax collector, whose sins are outweighed by a single piece of bread given to a beggar. Perhaps the plot with the scales is also of Egyptian origin and goes back to the Book of the Dead, where the god Anubis weighs the hearts of the dead; according to the results of the measurement, the soul either moved on or was destroyed. The concept of comparing the “weight” of deeds is found repeatedly in the Old Testament, in early Christian authors, and in hagiographical literature. According to the monk Anastasius Sinaiticus (VII century), the demons additionally press on the cup with evil deeds, but, as explained by his younger contemporary John Damascene, with a slight preponderance of evil, God gives his favor. A different version of the pre-death judgment, with the possibility of the dying person to justify himself for his deeds, is given in the work of St. John the Chronicler (Chapter 7, “On Joyful Lamentation”) [25].

The idea of stops at which the soul is tested by demons in various vices and charged tribute is fully revealed in the vision of St. Basil the New about Theodora's walk on the air publicans (mid-10th century) [26]. According to Basil, the soul of the deceased passes through 22 stages, each of which reports information about the good and evil deeds committed during life. Depending on the balance of these deeds, the soul is sent to heaven or hell, but the outcome can be changed by the intercession of a saint [27]. During the course of the imaginary journey, the angels explain to Theodora the essence of the taxation and the factors affecting posthumous fate. In particular, the number of sins recorded with demons can be reduced by repenting to a spiritual father, performing the penance assigned by him, and receiving forgiveness from him [28]. Texts written later than the Vita of Basil the New predominantly rely on the story of Theodora. Such is, for example, the hagiography of the fictitious Archbishop of Constantinople, Niphon, compiled in the early 11th century, which sets forth a similar view of the organization of the ordeal. Of later works, “Dioptra” by Philip Monotropus (1095) is of interest, in one of its poetic chapters outlining the entire course of the afterlife from the moment of death to the Last Judgment. The story of Monotropus, in its main points, corresponds to the Life of Basil the New but does not refer to it directly and probably goes back to an older tradition [29]. The result of centuries of Byzantine reflections on posthumous retribution was the Theological Chapters by Michael Glykas, who justified the struggle between angels and demons for the soul of the dying with references to the Bible and Sacred Tradition, avoiding any mention of the taxation and the procedure of weighing deeds. After Glykas, the discussion of private judgment virtually ceased, perhaps as a result of familiarity with the Catholic concept of purgatory [30].

The place of the soul

At the conclusion of the private judgment, the souls of the righteous and sinners went to heaven and hell, respectively [22]. In Byzantine theology, there were various designations of hell that were not completely synonymous: the classical Greek Hades (Dr.-Greek ᾍδης, also Gades) was rendered in the Septuagint as sheol and was understood as the abode of all the dead; the New Testament Gehenna (Dr.-Greek γέεννα) had the meaning of a place of eternal fiery punishment [31]. There was no unanimity among early Byzantine authors regarding the geography of the afterlife. In the 4th century, Gregory of Nyssa, passing on the words of his dying sister, argued that Hades was not a physical place but a state of the soul, thus refuting the outdated vertical stratification of the afterlife [32]. The most influential exposition of the subject in Byzantium was Pseudo-Athanasius' Quaestiones ad Antiochum ducem (Answers to the Questions of Prince Antiochus), a collection of questions and answers created in the late 7th and early 8th centuries. According to him, the souls of saints and the righteous go to Paradise, while the souls of sinners go to Hades, but in both cases, they experience only a foretaste of what is in store for them after the Last Judgment [33]. Later on, the approach of pseudo-Athanasius was dominant, and at the end of the 9th century Patriarch Photios proved that paradise is not the same as the Kingdom of God, whose dignities are substantially higher. Similarly, in the second half of the eleventh century, Archbishop Theophylact of Ohrid, in his interpretation of Luke. 23:39-43 argued that the prudent robber entered paradise as a place of spiritual rest, but not the kingdom of heaven. Among alternative viewpoints, the most significant are the statements of the monk Nikita Stiphata, who argued that paradise was closed after Adam for lack of necessity. According to Stiphat, the reunion of the souls of the saints and the righteous before the face of the Trinity in the Kingdom of Heaven is like a reunion of old friends, and the same is true of the souls of sinners meeting their dark lord in Hades. Thus, Stiphatus sees the afterlife as a continuation of the earthly life. Nor does he see the need for a private judgment, since the direction of man's deeds is self-evident[34].

The problems of spatial localization, reachability, and topology of the afterlife are solved in different ways in the sources. In the vision of Basil the New, Theodora and her companions traverse water, air, and two clouds on their way to paradise. Upon arrival, Theodora sees the throne of God and a pastoral landscape with various dwellings of the saints. The dwellings are like palaces, and their appearance depends on the category to which the righteous person belongs (prophets, martyrs, saints, etc.). The most attractive is the bosom of Abraham, which is the residence of the twelve patriarchs and the souls of baptized infants. These last two areas form paradise. There was no single canon for describing paradise, and other authors emphasized different biblical characters [35]. In the apocalypses of Theotokos and Anastasius, the protagonists travel west, south, or left of paradise, and the only manifestation of the vertical aspect is the throne located in the heavens. Thus, hell is not beneath the earth but is part of heavenly space, and sinners are not completely separated from God's authority. The areas of punishment for sinners and reward for the righteous in the apocalypses have a complex structure [36]. According to historian Jane Baun, who has studied these apocalypses in detail, the allocation of certain types of transgressions (adultery, usury, eavesdropping, dishonest trade, etc.) for which specific punishments were intended reflected the moral demands of the rural community, defining patterns of righteous behavior [37].

Burial rituals

Burial traditions continuity

Common mortals

On a deathbed

Burial preparations

Notes

References

Bibliography

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