Chapter 14

Medieval Dissenters

Mystics, Limbo, and Quiet Voices — The Long Hope Beneath the Scholastic Consensus

A. The Anchoress in the Cell

It is May of 1373. A young woman in Norwich is dying. She is thirty years old, and the parish curate has come to give her last rites. He holds a crucifix before her eyes so the last thing she sees in this world will be the face of Christ. Her mother, watching at the bedside, thinks she is already gone and reaches out to close her eyes.¹

But the dying woman is not gone. For about five hours that afternoon, and then once more the next night, she sees things. Sixteen of them. Visions, she calls them — “showings,” in her plain English. She sees Christ on the cross, bleeding, suffering, smiling. She sees the devil with red skin and a foul smell. She sees a little thing the size of a hazelnut in the palm of her hand, and she understands that it is “all that is made.”²

And then she does not die. By the next day she is recovering. She lives another forty years or more, walled into a small stone cell beside the church of St. Julian in Norwich, praying, writing, counseling anyone who came to her window. We do not know her real name. She is known to us only by the name of the church she lived beside: Julian.

I bring her up first because she asked the question this whole book is really about. She was a daughter of the medieval Latin Church. She believed, as her Church taught her, that some people would be damned to hell forever. She did not have the freedom to deny that doctrine — and she did not want to. She trusted her Church. But during her showings she heard something different from God. She heard, in a voice she could not shake, that “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”³

How could both be true? How could the Church's teaching about damnation be right and her Lord's words about all things being well also be right? Julian sat with that tension for twenty years. She refused to resolve it by denying either side. She trusted that God knew something she did not know — that there was, as she put it, a “great deed” God would do at the end, hidden now, that would somehow make both the Church and the Lord true at once.

That is what this chapter is about. Not the great scholastic system we met in Chapter 13, where Anselm and Aquinas worked out the metaphysics of why hell must be eternal. This chapter is about the voices underneath that system. The quiet ones. The mystical ones. The ones who, even at the height of the Augustinian-Thomist consensus, kept saying — sometimes in carefully guarded language, sometimes in language that got them in trouble — that maybe the consensus was not the whole story.

If you read certain modern preachers, you would think the medieval Latin Church spoke with one voice about hell. Aquinas on damnation, Dante on the rings of the inferno, every priest of every parish on the eternal flames — one consensus, one teaching, all the way from Augustine in the fifth century to Luther in the sixteenth. Push back on eternal conscious torment today and you will be told you are abandoning “a thousand years of Catholic teaching.”

That claim is half true. The dominant voice was indeed strict. Aquinas's view ruled the schools, and his view became the framework for how parish priests preached. But the medieval Latin world was not monolithic. Under the dominant voice ran quieter ones. A Dominican preacher in Strasbourg gathered crowds of laypeople and nuns and Beguines to hear about the spark of the soul that is one with God. An anchoress in Norwich wrote down what she had heard the Lord say about all things being well. A German treatise — the one Luther later edited and praised — kept the question of mercy open. Theologians who tried to soften the doctrine of damnation for unbaptized infants invented limbo, and the doctrine of limbo carried its own admission that something about the strict scheme did not sit right.

Heterodox movements — the spiritual Franciscans, the Joachimites, even (in their own strange way) the Cathars — kept saying that the official Church did not have the last word about the shape of the future. And underneath all of this, the writings of John Scotus Eriugena, formally condemned in 1225 but never actually destroyed, kept circulating through the libraries of monasteries that quietly preferred them to the harder line.

This is the story of those voices. They did not overthrow the consensus. Most of them did not even directly oppose it. But they kept the long hope alive. They kept the question open. They left a door cracked that the Reformation would later try to close, and that the modern recovery would eventually push back open.

B. The Medieval Landscape — A Time and a Place

Before we meet the figures, let me set the scene. The years that concern us run roughly from 1250 to 1450 — the two centuries that saw the crystallization of the scholastic synthesis under Aquinas (d. 1274), the Avignon papacy (1309–1377), the Great Schism (1378–1417), the Black Death (1347–1350 and after), the Peasants' Revolt in England (1381), and the early stirrings of what would become the Reformation.⁴

This was a Latin Christian world that knew it was Christian and knew (in its dominant institutions) that it had the truth. The Church's reach into daily life was enormous. The sacraments structured the year, the bell tower marked the hours, the parish priest baptized the babies and buried the dead. To be born in this world was to be born into a system that already had answers for the deepest questions — where you came from, why you suffered, where you would go.

The system was not always at peace with itself. The Avignon papacy moved the pope to France and made him look (especially to non-French Christians) like a French political tool. The Great Schism produced two and then three rival popes at once, each excommunicating the others, leaving ordinary believers wondering which pope held the keys. The Black Death emptied villages and left survivors haunted by the suspicion that God was angry — or absent. Universities had multiplied since the twelfth century, and with them came new appetites for argument, distinction, system. The Dominicans and Franciscans, both founded in the early thirteenth century, brought trained preachers into the streets and squares of cities that had previously known only the parish priest.

Out of this churn came a remarkable flowering. Two things happened together that look like they should be opposites. On the one hand, scholastic theology hardened into systems — Aquinas's Summa, Bonaventure's Breviloquium, the great commentaries on Peter Lombard's Sentences that every theology student had to write. On the other hand, mysticism flowered as it had never flowered before. The Rhineland produced Meister Eckhart, Tauler, Suso. The Low Countries produced Hadewijch, Ruusbroec, the Beguines.⁵ England produced Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, and Julian of Norwich. Italy produced Catherine of Siena. Spain would later produce Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross.

These were not opposite movements. Many of the mystics were also schoolmen. Eckhart held a master's chair at Paris before he ever preached a mystical sermon in Strasbourg. Bonaventure was both a scholastic and a mystic. The lines we now draw between “academic theology” and “spirituality” would have made no sense to them. But the mystics' angle of approach was different. The scholastics asked: what must be true about God, given the principles of metaphysics? The mystics asked: what is it like to be in the presence of God, and how does the soul prepare itself to receive Him?

That difference of angle matters for our story. The scholastics, working with Aristotelian principles about the soul's immutability after death, tended toward the strict eschatology we saw in the last chapter. The mystics, working with the experience of the soul drawn into the divine love, tended in a different direction. They did not deny the strict doctrine — most of them could not have, and many of them did not want to. But they tilted, in their language and their emphasis, toward the boundless mercy of God in a way that left the long hope alive.

One more piece of context. By the fourteenth century, the vernacular was rising. Latin remained the language of the schools and the liturgy. But the great mystics increasingly preached and wrote in German, French, English, Italian. Eckhart's German sermons reached audiences who would never have read his Latin commentaries. Julian wrote her revelations in English — the earliest surviving book in English by a woman.⁶ The Theologia Germanica circulated in German. This linguistic shift mattered. It meant that theological speculation was no longer the property of clerical scholars alone. It meant ordinary believers could meet God in their own tongue. And it meant that mystical theology, with its less guarded language about divine mercy, found a wider audience than scholastic theology ever did.

That is the world we are entering. A world of strict consensus on the surface and surprising depth underneath. A world where the long hope kept finding voices, even when those voices had to be careful about how they spoke.

C. The Primary Sources — What the Dissenters Actually Said

Meister Eckhart: The Spark in the Soul

Johannes Eckhart was born around 1260 in Hochheim, in Thuringia in central Germany.⁷ The honorific “Meister” — German for “master” — refers to the academic title of magister, master of theology, which he earned at the University of Paris in 1302. He joined the Dominicans as a teenager and rose quickly. By his early thirties he was lecturing at Paris on Peter Lombard's Sentences, the standard theology textbook of the day. By 1303 he was provincial of the Dominicans for the whole of Saxony — a vast administrative region. Later he became vicar of Bohemia. From 1313 to about 1323 he lived and preached in Strasbourg, and then he moved to Cologne, where he taught at the Dominican studium and where his troubles began.⁸

Picture him in Strasbourg in 1320 or so. He is sixty years old. He has a long career behind him as administrator and academic. But what he is best known for now is preaching, in German, to crowds of Dominican and Cistercian nuns, Beguines, and laypeople who pack into the chapel to hear him. He talks about God in ways no one has talked about God before — at least not in the vernacular, not for ordinary believers.

The heart of Eckhart's preaching is what he calls the Grund — the ground of the soul. Pronounced “groond,” it is the German word for “ground” or “bottom” or “foundation.” Eckhart says there is a place at the bottom of every soul, a place deeper than any of the soul's faculties (memory, intellect, will), where God and the soul meet. He calls this place the Seelenfünklein — the “little spark” or “sparklet” of the soul. Pronounced roughly “ZAY-len-FOONK-line.”⁹ The Latin equivalent he sometimes uses is scintilla animae, the “spark of the soul.”

What is the spark? Listen to Eckhart's own words, from his German sermons:

There is something in the soul that is so akin to God that it is one with Him and not just united. It is one, it has nothing in common with anything, nor has anything created anything in common with it. All that is created is nothing. But this is far removed from all created things. If a man were wholly so, he would be wholly uncreated and uncreatable. — Meister Eckhart, Sermon 13 (Quint numbering), in the Walshe translation.¹⁰

Read that slowly. Eckhart is saying there is something in the soul that is so close to God that it is not just “united” with God — that would imply two things stuck together — but actually one with God. So close that it has nothing in common with the created world. So close that, if a person were wholly identified with this spark, that person would be “uncreated and uncreatable.”

This is bold language. It is the kind of language that gets you in trouble. And it got Eckhart in trouble.

But before we get to the trouble, notice what this language implies for the long hope. If there is in every soul a spark that is “one with God,” that has “nothing in common” with sin, that is “uncreated and uncreatable” — then how can that soul ever be finally lost? How can God damn forever a soul that has, at its deepest center, a place that is one with Him? Eckhart never quite asked that question in those words. But the question hovers over everything he wrote. The mystics who came after him — Tauler especially — heard it hovering and could not unhear it.

Eckhart also taught what he called “detachment” — in German, Abgeschiedenheit (AHB-ge-SHEED-en-hite). He meant the soul's letting go of every created thing, including its own ideas about God, so that the spark might burn freely. In his treatise On Detachment, he wrote that detachment is the highest virtue, higher even than love — because love makes us love God, but detachment empties us so that God can love us.¹²

Now, what did Eckhart actually teach about hell? Here we must tread carefully. Eckhart never directly denied the doctrine of eternal conscious torment. He could not have, and he probably did not want to. As a Dominican preacher in good standing, he held what the Church taught. He did warn his hearers about hell. He did speak about the damned. He did not say, “the damned will be saved in the end.”

But he said other things that point sideways. He said that God is more the soul's salvation than the soul itself wants to be saved. He said that God's love and God's justice are not two things but one thing. He said — and this is one of his most striking passages — that God enjoys His own goodness in everything, even in evil:

Even in evil — I say, in the evil both of guilt and of punishment — there shines forth and is equally manifested God's glory. — Eckhart, in a proposition recorded by the Cologne inquisitors, later condemned in In Agro Dominico.¹³

This is one of the propositions that was later condemned. The inquisitors heard it as a denial that there is real evil. Eckhart insisted it meant something different: God's glory shines even where evil happens, because God's wisdom turns evil to good. But you can see why his judges were nervous. If God's glory shines equally in damnation as in salvation — what does damnation mean? What is finally at stake?

His trial began in 1326 in Cologne. The archbishop, Heinrich von Virneburg, was a Franciscan with little love for Dominican mystics. Two lists of suspect propositions were drawn from Eckhart's German sermons and Latin works. Eckhart defended himself vigorously. He insisted that the propositions had been pulled from context and that his teaching, properly understood, was orthodox. When the local proceedings did not go his way, he appealed to the pope at Avignon.

He traveled to Avignon. We do not know exactly when he died, but it was before the papal decision came down. The current best estimate is that he died sometime in 1328.¹⁴

On March 27, 1329, Pope John XXII issued the bull In Agro Dominico (“In the Lord's Field”). The bull condemned twenty-eight propositions said to have been taken from Eckhart's writings — seventeen as “heretical” or containing heresy, eleven as “evil-sounding” or suspect of heresy, and the final two as having been taught by Eckhart and likewise heretical.¹⁵ The bull was careful to note that Eckhart had submitted his teaching to the judgment of the Apostolic See before he died — so the bull condemned the propositions, not Eckhart personally. Still, the effect was that Eckhart's writings were officially under a cloud for centuries.

Scholars today are divided about whether the condemned propositions actually represent Eckhart's view. Bernard McGinn, the foremost living scholar of Christian mysticism, argues that the inquisitors systematically misread him.¹⁶ Eckhart's German is dense, paradoxical, and often deliberately exaggerated for rhetorical effect. He liked to make his hearers gasp. The inquisitors, working from extracts and looking for heresy, found what they were looking for. Edmund Colledge and other modern editors have argued that the bull's condemnations are mostly the result of taking Eckhart at his most provocative moment without his careful context.¹⁷ The Dominican Order itself, in the late twentieth century, pressed (unsuccessfully so far) for Eckhart's full rehabilitation.

For our purposes, the key point is this. Eckhart did not directly teach universal salvation. But the structure of his theology — the spark of the soul that is one with God, the ground in which God and the soul meet, the glory of God shining in all things — left a door cracked open through which the long hope would walk. His disciples Tauler and Suso heard the implication and softened it for safer presentation. Later German mysticism, including the Theologia Germanica, carried Eckhart's themes forward. And when Luther came along two centuries later, Eckhart's spiritual descendants were still in print and still being read.

Johann Tauler and Henry Suso: The Quieter Voices

Johann Tauler (c. 1300–1361) was Eckhart's most important successor.¹⁸ Born in Strasbourg around 1300, he joined the Dominicans there, probably heard Eckhart preach in person, and became one of the great preachers of his own generation. He lived through the Black Death, which ravaged Strasbourg in 1349, and he stayed in the city throughout the worst of it, preaching to the dying and comforting the bereaved. He died in 1361.

Tauler is gentler than Eckhart, less philosophically venturesome, but no less profound. He took Eckhart's idea of the Grund, the ground of the soul, and made it the center of his own preaching — but with more pastoral care. Where Eckhart sometimes seemed to fly so high that ordinary believers could not follow, Tauler kept his feet on the ground. He preached about how to recognize God's voice in the ordinary day. He preached about suffering — and given when he was preaching, he had ample material. He preached, again and again, about God's mercy.

Consider this passage from one of his Lenten sermons:

Beloved children, our Lord knows full well what He intends to do with us. He has set His love on us from all eternity, and He will not be turned aside. Though we wander far, His love wanders with us. Though we sleep, His love is awake. There is no place we can go, no depth we can fall to, that His love has not already gone and waited for us. — Johann Tauler, paraphrased from the Vetter edition of the German sermons.¹⁹

Notice the language: God's love “has already gone and waited for us” in the depths we might fall to. Tauler does not say, “and therefore all shall be saved.” He does not deny that some are lost. But the texture of his preaching keeps lifting up God's pursuing love until you can hardly imagine where it could not finally reach.

Henry Suso (c. 1295–1366) — properly Heinrich Seuse — was the third of the great Rhineland Dominican mystics.²⁰ Born in Constance, he too was a student of Eckhart's circle. He is less philosophical than Tauler, more devotional, more focused on the Passion of Christ. His Little Book of Eternal Wisdom (Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit) became one of the most-read devotional books of the late Middle Ages — translated into Latin as the Horologium Sapientiae (“Clock of Wisdom”), and circulating in something like four hundred surviving manuscripts. After the Imitation of Christ, it was probably the most-read spiritual book in northern Europe before the printing press.²¹

Suso's Little Book takes the form of a dialogue between the Servant (Suso) and Eternal Wisdom (Christ). The Servant asks Wisdom about the deepest matters: how to suffer well, how to die well, how to live in the love of God. The book is gentle, fervent, and full of an aching tenderness. It dwells on the Passion at length. It also includes some remarkable passages about God's mercy that, while never denying the strict doctrine of damnation, repeatedly emphasize the depth of God's love for sinners.

Here is the texture. After describing the agony of the cross, the Servant asks Wisdom about those who do not love Him. Wisdom answers in language that does not foreclose hope:

Behold, My love is not weary, though men weary themselves with sin. My arms are not folded, though men fold themselves against Me. As long as a soul lives, there is no sin so dark that My mercy is not deeper. — Henry Suso, paraphrased from The Little Book of Eternal Wisdom, the Frank Tobin translation.²²

“As long as a soul lives.” Suso, like all the Rhineland mystics, accepts that death sets some kind of boundary. He does not directly contradict the dominant Church teaching. But the door he leaves open — the door of God's mercy that reaches into every depth of sin while the soul still breathes — is wider than the strict scholastic doctrine would lead one to expect. And when his book is translated and read across Europe for two centuries, that wider door reaches a vast audience.

Tauler and Suso did not start a universalist movement. They were faithful Dominicans, devoted to the Church, careful in how they spoke. But the spiritual register they kept open — the deep, patient, pursuing mercy of God — would feed directly into later Lutheran spirituality (Luther loved Tauler) and into German Pietism. The Pietists would in turn produce the eighteenth-century universalists we will meet in Chapter 16. The Rhineland line of the long hope runs directly through Eckhart, Tauler, and Suso.

The Theologia Germanica: An Anonymous Spark

Sometime in the second half of the fourteenth century — probably between 1350 and 1400 — an anonymous German priest sat down and wrote a short treatise about how the soul comes to union with God. He never told us his name. The only thing we know about him is that he served as a custodian of the house of the Teutonic Knights in Frankfurt. So the work has sometimes been called Der Frankfurter (“The Frankfurter”).²³ But the standard name is the one Luther gave it: Theologia Germanica — “German Theology.”

Luther came across the manuscript in 1516, published a partial edition that year, and then issued a complete edition in 1518.²⁴ He praised it lavishly. In his preface to the 1518 edition he wrote that “next to the Bible and St. Augustine, no other book has come to my attention from which I have learned more of what God, Christ, man, and all things are.”²⁵ That is high praise — and it tells you something about the line of inheritance from late-medieval German mysticism into the Reformation.

What does the Theologia Germanica teach? Its main concern is the loss of self-will. The book argues that the root of sin is the soul's clinging to itself, its insistence on being its own center. The cure is what later spiritual writers would call “self-emptying” — a willing letting-go of one's own claim to be God of one's own life. Once the soul is emptied of self, God can fill it. The book is profoundly Christ-centered. It uses the language of Eckhart's school but without Eckhart's more provocative speculations.

On the question of damnation, the Theologia Germanica is careful but suggestive. It accepts that some souls turn away from God. It speaks of hell as a state — the state of the self-willed soul that refuses to be emptied. But it does not slam the door. In its quiet way, it keeps the question of mercy open. It hints, repeatedly, that the love of God reaches further than human reckoning. And it provides the spiritual vocabulary — emptying, surrender, divine ground — that German Pietism would later use to articulate a much more explicit long hope.

Julian of Norwich: All Shall Be Well

Now we come to the heart of this chapter. Julian of Norwich is, I think, the single most important medieval voice for the long hope in the Latin West — not because she taught universal salvation outright (she did not), but because she held the tension between Church teaching and divine mercy more honestly than anyone else of her age.

Born around 1342, probably in Norwich, she received her sixteen showings on May 13, 1373, at the age of thirty.²⁶ Some time after — we do not know exactly when she became an anchoress, but bequests in 1394 already refer to her as “Julian, ankorite”²⁷ — she walled herself into a small cell beside the church of St. Julian in Norwich, and there she lived for the rest of her life. She wrote two versions of her revelations. The Short Text, probably composed soon after the showings, runs to about twenty-five chapters in modern editions. The Long Text, composed about twenty years later (1393 or so), runs to eighty-six chapters and includes her sustained theological reflection on what the showings meant.²⁸

Norwich in Julian's lifetime was a major commercial city, ravaged repeatedly by plague. Julian would have lost neighbors, perhaps family. The Lollard movement was active in England. The Peasants' Revolt of 1381 shook the country. Three popes claimed the keys at once during the Great Schism. It was, by any measure, a hard time to keep faith. And Julian — alone in her cell, writing in plain English — kept faith with a confidence that has astonished readers ever since.

Her central question is the question of evil. If God loves the world, why is there sin? If God has the power to make all things well, why are some lost? She circles around this question through her whole Long Text. She does not pretend she has an answer her Church could endorse. But she records, with the integrity of an honest witness, what the Lord showed her.

The famous passage comes in Chapter 27 of the Long Text, in the Thirteenth Revelation. Julian has been wrestling with the problem of sin. She would, she says, have preferred that God had never permitted sin to exist at all — for then all manner of things would have been well. Then comes the Lord's answer:

Sin is behovely, but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. — Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, Long Text, ch. 27 (the Watson and Jenkins critical edition modernized; the original is “Synne is behovabil, but alle shalle be wele, and alle shalle be wele, and alle maner of thinge shalle be wele”).²⁹

That word “behovely” — modern English “needful” or “fitting” or “necessary” — is one of the most puzzling words in the entire mystical tradition. Julian does not say sin is good. She does not say God caused sin. She says sin is “behovely” — somehow built into the order of things in a way that, when seen from God's vantage, fits the whole. Denys Turner, in his careful study of Julian, devotes nearly a whole book to unpacking this single word.³⁰

And then the second half: “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” She repeats the phrase three times. Not as a wish. Not as a hope. As something the Lord directly told her about what He intends to do.

What does she mean? Julian herself recognizes immediately that the words seem to clash with what the Church teaches. The Church teaches that some are damned. She asks the Lord about this. The Lord does not contradict the Church. But He gives her something else — the promise of what she comes to call “the Great Deed.”

In Chapter 32 of the Long Text she explains:

There is a deed which the blessed Trinity shall do on the last day, as I see it, and when the deed shall be done, and how it shall be done, is unknown to all creatures who are under Christ, and shall be unknown until it is done.... And this is the great deed ordained of our Lord God from without beginning, treasured and hidden in his blessed breast, only known to himself, by which deed he shall make all things well. For just as the blessed Trinity made all things from nothing, just so the same blessed Trinity shall make well all that is not well. — Julian of Norwich, Revelations, Long Text, ch. 32 (modernized).³¹

Read that passage with care. Julian is reporting that the Lord has told her there is a deed — a single great deed — that He will do on the last day. The deed is hidden now. No creature knows what it will be. But it will make all things well. It will make well “all that is not well.”

What is the “all that is not well”? It is sin. It is suffering. It is — though Julian does not say this in so many words — the damned. Whatever the Great Deed turns out to be, it will somehow set all that right. Julian does not know how. She does not pretend to know. She holds the Church's teaching (some are damned) and the Lord's word to her (all shall be well) in unresolved tension, trusting that on the last day God will reveal a deed that makes both true at once.

Notice the verbs. “I may, I can, I will, I shall.” The Lord is at pains to insist that He has not only the right and the power but the active will to make all manner of thing well. Julian heard this as a promise. She did not invent it. She wrote down what she heard. And then she lived for twenty years with the impossibility of fitting it into the strict doctrine of her age.

One more piece of Julian I want you to see. In Chapters 58 to 63 of the Long Text she develops, with astonishing tenderness, the picture of God as Mother. Christ, she says, is our Mother as truly as God is our Father. She is not being metaphorical for poetic effect. She is making a theological claim: that the maternal love which a human mother shows her child is itself a reflection of the love that Christ has for every soul. And a mother, she says, does not abandon her child when the child sins. She does not finally let the child go.³³

You can feel where this leads. If Christ is Mother, and a mother does not abandon her child, then how can Christ finally abandon the souls He has made? Julian does not draw the conclusion in so many words. She lets the picture do the work. But the picture is unmistakable.

What did Julian actually hold, then, about the fate of the damned? Here is my honest read. She held three things together that most theologians would say cannot be held together. First, that the Church's teaching about damnation is true. Second, that the Lord told her all manner of thing shall be well. Third, that there is a Great Deed coming, hidden now, that will somehow reconcile the first two. She did not collapse the tension. She did not become a universalist (though some modern readers want to make her one). She did not abandon orthodoxy (though some traditionalist readers want to make her safer than she was). She lived in the tension and trusted God to resolve it.

That is the long hope in its most honest medieval form. Not a doctrine. A trust.

The Limbo Question

Move now from the mystics to the schoolmen — but to a peculiar corner of scholastic theology where the strict doctrine of damnation began to crack from inside.

The question was this: what happens to infants who die without baptism? The medieval Latin Church taught that baptism is necessary for salvation. It also taught that infants are born with original sin and so cannot enter heaven without baptism. But infants commit no actual sins of their own. Are they really damned, in any meaningful sense? Are they really tortured forever for sins they could not have committed?

The early medieval answer, going back to Augustine, was harsh. Augustine taught that unbaptized infants were “damned with the gentlest damnation” — but damned all the same.³⁴ The justice of this troubled people then as it troubles us now. By the twelfth century, theologians were looking for ways out.

Peter Abelard (1079–1142) seems to have been the first to propose, clearly, that unbaptized infants did not suffer the positive pains of hell but only the loss of the beatific vision — and that they enjoyed a kind of “natural happiness” in their state.³⁵ Aquinas developed this view further. He argued that unbaptized infants are in limbus infantium — the “limbo of infants” — a state at the border (limbus = edge, hem) of hell, where they suffer no positive punishment, where they may even enjoy a real if natural beatitude, but where they are excluded from the vision of God.³⁶

The doctrine of limbo became standard teaching in Catholic theology, though never raised to the level of dogma. It is important to see what limbo actually was. It was an admission, by the schoolmen themselves, that the strict doctrine of damnation did not fit certain cases. It was an effort to soften the consequences of the system by inventing a third state — neither heaven nor hell, but something in between, where God's love could still reach the souls who had not had the chance to receive baptism.

This admission has theological teeth. If the schoolmen could invent a third state for unbaptized infants, why not for other cases? What about the unevangelized — those who never heard the gospel through no fault of their own? What about the mentally disabled, who could not have understood the gospel even if it had been preached to them? What about pious pagans before Christ? The medieval West generally placed the Old Testament patriarchs in limbus patrum (“limbo of the fathers”) — a different limbo, from which Christ released them during the harrowing of hell. But the existence of two limbos already suggests that the strict three-fold scheme (heaven, hell, purgatory) was straining under the cases it could not handle.

The Catholic Church has, in our own time, quietly revised its teaching on limbo. In April 2007, with the approval of Pope Benedict XVI, the International Theological Commission published a document titled “The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die Without Being Baptized.”³⁷ The document does not officially abolish limbo. But it “downgrades” the doctrine from common teaching to “a possible theological hypothesis”³⁸ — and concludes that there are “serious theological and liturgical grounds for hope that unbaptized infants who die will be saved and enjoy the Beatific Vision.”³⁹ Then-Cardinal Ratzinger had said, even before he became pope, that limbo had been “only a theological hypothesis” and “never a defined truth of faith.”⁴⁰

Why does this matter for our story? Because limbo was always a tacit admission that the strict doctrine of damnation did not satisfy. The medieval mind invented a softening — and the modern Catholic mind has now quietly retired even that softening in favor of an explicit hope for the salvation of those who could not believe. The arc bends toward the long hope. It has been bending for centuries.

Heterodox Voices — Cathars, Spiritual Franciscans, Joachimites

Outside the mainstream, other dissenters appeared. They were not all sympathetic to the long hope, and some of them held positions the long hope tradition cannot endorse. I want to be honest about this. Distinguishing the medieval long hope from movements that merely rejected mainstream Christianity is important.

Take the Cathars first. The Cathars (also called Albigensians, from the southern French town of Albi) were a dualist movement that flourished in southern France from about 1140 to the early thirteenth century, when the Albigensian Crusade and the Inquisition largely destroyed them.⁴¹ Their teaching was not Christian in any orthodox sense. They held that there were two gods — a good god of the spirit and an evil god of the material world. They denied the resurrection of the body. They denied the sacraments. Their eschatology was a kind of recurring reincarnation through which souls were eventually purified by escaping the material world entirely.

The Cathar position is not part of the long hope tradition. It rejects the very framework — the goodness of God, the goodness of creation, the resurrection of the body — within which the long hope makes sense. I mention the Cathars only because some scholars have wanted to lump them in with medieval “universalists” or “dissenters,” and the lumping is misleading. The long hope is a hope that God, who made the world good, will redeem the whole world good. The Cathars thought the world should not have been made at all. These are different positions. They should be kept distinct.

The spiritual Franciscans are a different matter. To see them we have to go back to Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135–1202), the Calabrian abbot who developed a theology of three ages — the age of the Father (the Old Testament), the age of the Son (from Christ to roughly Joachim's own time), and the coming age of the Holy Spirit, in which a new spiritual people would be raised up and the Church itself would be transformed.⁴² Joachim's three-ages scheme was condemned in a limited way by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 (on a specific Trinitarian point), but his broader vision continued to inspire later generations.⁴³

The spiritual Franciscans took up Joachim's vision in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. They were the strict branch of the Franciscan Order who insisted on absolute poverty as Francis had originally taught it. They believed Francis himself had been the angel of the sixth seal (Revelation 7:2) and that a new spiritual age was dawning. Figures like Peter John Olivi (d. 1298) and Ubertino da Casale developed Joachimite eschatology in directions that the institutional Church found alarming. In 1318, several spiritual Franciscans were burned at the stake by Pope John XXII — the same pope who would later condemn Eckhart's propositions.⁴⁴

Where do the spiritual Franciscans fit in our story? They were not universalists in any straightforward sense. Joachim himself was not a universalist. But the spiritual Franciscans kept alive a sense that the institutional Church did not have the last word about the shape of the future. They believed God would do something new — something the existing structures could not contain. That posture, that openness to a divine future that exceeds the present scheme, is at least cousin to the long hope. The spiritual Franciscans show that the medieval Latin world contained voices willing to risk death rather than accept the dominant account of how God's salvation would unfold.

The English Lollards and the Bohemian Hussites belong in this picture too, though their eschatology was less central to their dissent. John Wycliffe (c. 1320s–1384) and his followers — the Lollards — challenged the Latin Church on many fronts: vernacular Scripture, the authority of the pope, the doctrine of transubstantiation, the immorality of much of the clergy. Eschatology was not their main concern. But their willingness to challenge consensus is part of the wider story of medieval Latin dissent. The Hussites, following Jan Hus (c. 1369–1415), did the same in Bohemia. When the Reformation came, the soil had been prepared.

The Eriugenan Undercurrent

One more strand I want to track briefly. The great Carolingian theologian John Scotus Eriugena (c. 815–c. 877) — treated at length in Chapter 11 — wrote a massive metaphysical work called Periphyseon (“On the Division of Nature”) that included a clear doctrine of universal restoration. In 1225, Pope Honorius III formally condemned the work and ordered all copies destroyed.⁴⁵

The condemnation did not entirely work. Manuscripts of Eriugena's Periphyseon survived in monastic libraries. More importantly, his Latin translations of pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite — the mystical writings that had so deeply shaped the Greek Christian tradition — continued to circulate widely, with his commentaries attached. Through pseudo-Dionysius, Eriugena's metaphysical vision of the world's procession from God and return to God was quietly transmitted into the medieval mystical tradition. Eckhart knew Dionysius. Tauler did. Suso did. The German Theology did. Julian, I suspect, did not directly know him, but the broader theological air of her time had been shaped by him.⁴⁶

The Eriugenan strain in medieval mysticism is one of the quiet underground rivers of the long hope. It did not surface in any explicit doctrinal statement. But it was there, shaping the way the mystics thought about the soul's relation to God, about the procession of all things from God, about the return of all things to God. The mystics did not need to teach apokatastasis explicitly. They breathed the air in which apokatastasis was a natural conclusion.

D. Reception — How These Voices Were Heard

How were these dissenting voices received? The short answer is: at first, with suspicion or neglect. Later, with rediscovery.

Eckhart's case is the clearest. His condemnation in 1329 put a long cloud over his writings. The Dominican Order itself, embarrassed by the condemnation of one of its star preachers, allowed his Latin works to fall mostly out of circulation for centuries. His German sermons survived in manuscript collections, often anonymously, sometimes mixed with works by Tauler and Suso so that no one knew which sermons were by whom. The full critical recovery of Eckhart's writings is a twentieth-century project. The German critical edition (Quint and others) began in the 1930s and is still being completed.⁴⁷ The English Walshe translation in three volumes appeared in the 1980s. The Colledge and McGinn volume in the Classics of Western Spirituality series, published in 1981, brought Eckhart to a wide English-speaking audience.

Today the scholarly consensus has shifted strongly in Eckhart's favor. McGinn, Davies, Tobin, Sells, and others read him as fundamentally orthodox, with the condemnations of 1329 reflecting more about Cologne politics and inquisitorial method than about real heterodoxy.⁴⁸ The Dominican Order has formally pressed for Eckhart's rehabilitation. The Catholic Church has not officially lifted the condemnation — but no one teaches the 1329 propositions as binding either. Eckhart is now widely taught in Catholic seminaries and universities, including some that take vows of fidelity to magisterial teaching. His influence on twentieth-century theology — from Karl Rahner to David Bentley Hart — is enormous.

Tauler and Suso fared better in their own time and after. Their works were widely copied and printed. Luther, as we have seen, loved Tauler. He marked up his own copy of Tauler's sermons heavily and quoted him in his lectures.⁴⁹ Through Luther, Tauler entered the Protestant spiritual tradition. Pietism — the movement we will meet in Chapter 16 — drew deeply on Tauler. So did the Quietist movement. So, in a roundabout way, did John Wesley, who read deeply in continental mystical sources.

The Theologia Germanica traveled similarly. Luther's edition of 1518 put it into the hands of every literate German Christian who could find a copy. The book was reprinted, translated into Latin, then into other European languages. The Spanish mystics knew it. The English Puritans had it. It became one of the foundational texts of the German Pietist tradition.

Julian of Norwich is a more peculiar case. In her own day, she was known locally — Margery Kempe famously came to visit her — but her writings hardly circulated.⁵⁰ The Long Text survived in just three medieval manuscripts. The first printed edition came out in 1670, edited by the English Benedictine Serenus Cressy.⁵¹ Even then, she was a minority taste. Her real reception is a twentieth-century phenomenon.

The watershed was T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, published between 1940 and 1942. In “Little Gidding,” Eliot famously quoted Julian:

Sin is Behovely, but
All shall be well, and
All manner of thing shall be well. — T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding” (1942), section III.⁵²

Eliot's lines made Julian famous overnight in the twentieth-century English-speaking world. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh produced their critical edition of her texts in 1978, in the Classics of Western Spirituality series.⁵³ Modern Julian scholarship has exploded: Denys Turner's Julian of Norwich, Theologian (Yale, 2011), Frederick Bauerschmidt's Julian of Norwich and the Mystical Body Politic of Christ, Grace Jantzen's Julian of Norwich, and the magisterial Watson-Jenkins critical edition (Penn State, 2006), to name only a few.⁵⁴

What does the modern reception read into Julian? A great deal. She has been claimed by feminist theologians (for her God-as-Mother passages), by hopeful universalists (for the “all shall be well” passages), by traditional Catholics (for her insistence on the Church's teaching), by Anglicans (for her plain English and her devotional warmth). The claiming is not entirely fair to her in any one direction. Julian was a complex figure whose work resists collapsing into any modern partisan reading.⁵⁵ But the breadth of her appeal is itself a sign of how much she still has to teach us.

The spiritual Franciscans were not so fortunate in their reception. Many were burned at the stake. Their writings circulated underground in small circles before being mostly lost. The modern scholarly recovery of figures like Olivi and Ubertino is recent work, much of it done by Marjorie Reeves, Bernard McGinn, and David Burr.⁵⁶ The wider Joachimite stream, however — the basic idea of a coming spiritual age that will exceed the present scheme — never quite died. It went underground, then resurfaced in radical Reformation movements, in later Pietism, in some strands of modern theology of hope.

The limbo doctrine had a slow death. It was taught steadily through the late Middle Ages and the early modern period. The Council of Trent (1545–1563) did not formally define it but did insist on the necessity of baptism. Pius VI in 1794 condemned a Jansenist proposition that denied limbo. But by the twentieth century, Catholic theologians were increasingly uncomfortable with the doctrine. Ratzinger said it had to go. And in 2007 the ITC document quietly removed it from the active teaching of the Church.⁵⁷

What does all this reception tell us? It tells us that the long hope, even when officially marginalized, was always there in the medieval Latin West. Always being read by some, always being preached by some, always being trusted by some. When the modern period rolled around and people started looking for resources to push back against the harshest reading of damnation, the medieval mystics and dissenters were waiting on the shelf to be read.

E. Assessment — What We Can and Cannot Conclude

Step back with me now. What can we actually conclude about the long hope in the medieval Latin West?

First — and this matters — none of the figures we have looked at in this chapter taught explicit universalism in the way Origen or Gregory of Nyssa or Isaac of Nineveh did. Eckhart did not. Tauler did not. Suso did not. The Theologia Germanica did not. Julian of Norwich did not. The spiritual Franciscans did not. The limbo theologians did not. We should not retroject onto these figures a modern universalist position they did not hold.

If you read Eckhart hoping to find “all shall be saved” in so many words, you will be disappointed. If you read Julian hoping to find a denial of damnation, you will be disappointed. These were medieval Latin Catholics. They lived within the Church's teaching. They did not propose to overturn it.

Second, and just as importantly: they did not let the strict doctrine have the last word about God. Each of them, in their own register, kept the door of mercy wider open than the dominant scholastic system allowed. Each of them said something that, if taken seriously, modifies the strict picture in significant ways.

Eckhart said there is in every soul a spark that is one with God and that has nothing in common with sin. If that is true, then the destruction of that spark is not really thinkable. The soul's deepest center is not lost.

Tauler said God's love has gone before us into every depth we might fall to. If that is true, then no fall is into nothing; God is already there.

Suso said as long as the soul lives, no sin is too dark for God's mercy. The qualifier “as long as the soul lives” respects the dominant doctrine. But the depth of mercy he proclaims is hard to reconcile with the picture of God consigning ordinary sinners to endless torment.

The Theologia Germanica kept the question of mercy open and made union with God — not avoidance of hell — the center of Christian life.

Julian held the Church's teaching and the Lord's word in tension and trusted God to do a Great Deed that would somehow make all things well.

The limbo theologians admitted, by inventing limbo, that the strict damnation doctrine could not handle the cases it most urgently faced.

The spiritual Franciscans believed God was about to do something the existing Church could not contain.

The Eriugenan undercurrent kept the metaphysical possibility of universal return quietly alive in the mystical mainstream.

Together, these voices do not amount to a denial of the strict doctrine. They amount to something more interesting. They amount to a tradition of holding the strict doctrine while refusing to let it close down the question of God's mercy. They are the long hope's medieval form.

Third, the medieval Latin world was not monolithic. The popular caricature — “the Catholic Church always taught eternal conscious torment, period” — is true at the level of the dominant scholastic doctrine. It is false at the level of the actual lived tradition. Below the scholastic doctrine ran a steady stream of voices — mystical, devotional, dissenting — that kept the long hope alive.

This matters for a contemporary debate. When a modern preacher says “the Christian tradition has always taught” X, and X is the strict damnation doctrine, the medieval evidence is more complicated than the claim allows. Yes, the dominant teaching was strict. But the tradition also includes Julian's “all shall be well,” Eckhart's spark of the soul, Tauler's preaching of God's pursuing love, the limbo doctrine's tacit confession that strict damnation could not handle the hard cases, and the Eriugenan undercurrent's quiet preservation of the apokatastasis-tradition's metaphysics.

Fourth — and this is where I have to be careful as a historian — these figures should not be turned into proxies for our debates. Julian was not arguing with John Calvin. Eckhart was not arguing with the modern Reformed Baptist position. They were arguing within their own world, with the categories of their own world. When we read them today, we have to let them speak in their own register. That register includes things we now find strange: the heavy emphasis on detachment, the language of the soul being “nothing,” the elaborate eschatological speculation of the Joachimites, the (frankly) baroque metaphysical scheme of Eriugena. Read them on their own terms, and then ask what their voices contribute to our story.

What they contribute is a witness. They witness that the strict scholastic doctrine never had the field to itself. They witness that mystical experience of God's love tended to push, again and again, against the harsher edges of the dominant teaching. They witness that the question of God's final mercy could be held open — even by the most orthodox of medieval Catholics — without explicit denial of the Church's teaching about damnation.

That witness matters. Not because it settles the modern debate. It does not. The debate today is over what Scripture teaches, what the patristic record really shows, what the philosophical implications of God's nature really are. Medieval mystics will not adjudicate those questions for us. But they will assure us that holding open the question of God's mercy is not a modern innovation. The mystics held it open. The Catholic Church, in its devotional life if not its scholastic doctrine, has held it open for centuries. We are not the first to suspect that “all shall be well” might mean what it sounds like it means.

F. Why This Matters

So why does this chapter belong in this book? Why should the contemporary reader, sitting with the question of the fate of the dead, care about an anchoress in fourteenth-century Norwich or a Dominican preacher in Strasbourg?

For three reasons.

First, because the modern caricature of “the medieval Church” as a monolith of strict damnation theology is wrong, and getting it right matters. When a Christian today is told that postmortem opportunity, conditional immortality, or hopeful universalism are “modern innovations” against “a thousand years of Catholic teaching,” the right response is partly: yes, the dominant medieval teaching was strict — but it was not the whole medieval teaching. Julian of Norwich, in the middle of the supposedly monolithic Latin Catholic age, wrote down what the Lord told her: all manner of thing shall be well. She did not invent that line. She heard it. She trusted it. She lived twenty years with it, and we are still reading her seven centuries later. That alone is enough to break the “monolith” story.

Second, because the medieval dissenters teach us something important about how the long hope can be held. Most of them did not hold it as a doctrine. They held it as a trust. They did not say, “I deny the doctrine of damnation; I assert universal salvation.” They said, “I trust that God will do what is right, and what He has shown me is that He intends to make all manner of thing well.” That is a different mode of theological engagement than systematic doctrine. It is a mode that puts trust in God prior to system about God. There is something for us to learn in that. It may be that the long hope is best held, even today, more as trust than as system. Robin Parry, Thomas Talbott, David Bentley Hart — the modern universalists in Chapter 25 — argue for universalism as doctrine. Many other contemporary Christians — including Hans Urs von Balthasar in Chapter 22 — hold it more as hope. Julian holds it most of all as trust. There is room in the long hope tradition for all three postures. And Julian's posture — quieter, more patient, more willing to live with unresolved tension — may be the most pastorally usable of all.

Third, because the limbo story shows that the Latin Catholic Church has been quietly retreating from the harshest versions of the strict doctrine for a long time. Not by reversing itself in a dramatic gesture. By softening, qualifying, adding hypotheses. Limbo was a softening; the 2007 ITC document was a softening of the softening. The arc of magisterial Catholic teaching, over centuries, has bent toward more hope, not less. That trajectory should at least give pause to anyone who treats the strictest sixteenth-century Protestant reading of hell as “what the Church has always taught.” The Church has been adjusting. It still is.

Here is what I take from this chapter, sitting with it as a Th.D. student who holds conditional immortality with postmortem opportunity, while remaining genuinely open to conservative biblical universalism. Julian's posture is the one I most want to inhabit. She believed her Church. She did not deny the doctrine of damnation. She also did not let the doctrine close down what God had shown her. She held both, and she trusted God to resolve them in a Great Deed she could not see now. That is, I think, where the most faithful long-hope position lives — not in denial of difficult teachings, not in collapsing the tension by force, but in the patient trust that the God who loves enough to die for sinners loves enough to find a way to make all manner of thing well.

The Christian who has not made up their mind on conditionalism, universalism, or postmortem opportunity can do worse than to start where Julian started. Trust God. Hold the difficult things together. Watch for what He shows you. Wait for the Great Deed.

It is also worth saying this. The medieval mystics did not preach the long hope in order to make sin less serious. They preached it because they had glimpsed something of the depth of divine love. The order matters. Begin with God's love — the love that hung on the cross, the love that pursued you when you were running, the love that has not given up on the most hardened sinner in your life — and the long hope follows from it. Begin with the doctrine of damnation as your fixed point, and try to fit love around it, and you will end up with the cramped picture the dissenters were always pushing against. Julian, Eckhart, Tauler, Suso, the Theologia Germanica — none of them were trying to soften sin. They were trying to honor love.

One last point. The mystics tell us that the long hope, in the medieval West, “went underground.” But underground is not the same as gone. Underground is where the deepest things grow. A seed has to be buried before it sprouts. The patristic universalists were buried by the Augustinian turn (Chapter 12). The Eriugenan tradition was buried in 1225. Eckhart was buried in 1329. Julian was buried in obscurity for centuries. And then, one by one, they came up. The Reformation found Tauler and the Theologia Germanica. The seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonists found the patristic universalists. The twentieth century found Julian and Eckhart. The twenty-first century found Isaac of Nineveh. The seeds have been sprouting for centuries.

This is what the long hope looks like at its quietest. Not a movement. Not a revolution. A quiet, patient, persistent insistence — through mystics and dissenters and anonymous priests and limbo-inventing schoolmen and condemned Carolingian metaphysicians — that God's love is wider than the strict doctrine can contain. The medieval West did not silence that insistence. It only buried it. And in our own day, we are still reading what was buried.

The next chapter takes us into the Reformation, where the strict Augustinian consensus will get tightened in some ways and loosened in others. Luther will love Tauler. Calvin will harden the Augustinian framework. The seeds will keep moving underground. The Spirit will keep stirring up voices that refuse to close the question of mercy. The long hope continues.