The Phenomenology of Immortality (1200–1400)

Summary

Medieval thinkers in the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Latin Christian West held diverse expectations about the phenomenology of immortality—what everlasting life would actually feel like. Scholastics speculated theoretically about bodily resurrection and perfect happiness, while mystics like Meister Eckhart and Marguerite Porete described a transcendent merging with the divine that erases multiplicity. Others, such as Hadewijch of Brabant and Angela of Foligno, portrayed the afterlife as an intimate experience preserving a sense of self. These views reveal deeper philosophical commitments about God, embodiment, happiness, and love.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Discussions of immortality in the Middles Ages tend to focus on the nature of the rational soul and its prospects for surviving the death of the body. The question of how medieval figures expected to experience everlasting life – what I will be calling the phenomenology of immortality – receives far less attention. Yet expectations for immortal existence speak volumes about a whole nest of important philosophical issues, including views about God, embodiment, happiness, and love. Examining medieval positions on this topic provides important insight not just into ideas about unending existence but about what it means to be human. In this paper, I explore the range of these expectations during a relatively narrow but intensely rich temporal and geographical slice of the Middle Ages (the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in the ‘Latin Christian West’). Scholastic and mystical/contemplative traditions during this time share a common focus on the final or ultimate end for human beings, although they differ with respect to methodology. Scholastics tend to address human expectations of immortality in discussions of the bodily resurrection, of perfect happiness (which we attain only in the life to come), and of Scriptural passages that were taken to refer to/ discuss the afterlife;2 these discussions tend to be entirely theoretical (as opposed to experiential), but they often display a lively curiosity about what our immortal experience will be like, speculating about questions such as how long our hair will be and how old we will appear.3 Contemplative and mystical works, by contrast, contain a wealth of first-person reports of union with God, many of which relate these unitive experiences to what the blessed will experience in the life to come.4 Some figures, such as Meister Eckhart (ca. 1260–1328) and Marguerite Porete (1250–1310), portray our final goal as a transcendent merging with the divine that includes “phenomenological de-emphasis, blurring, or eradication of multiplicity”.5 Other figures, such as Hadewijch of Brabant (ca. thirteenth century), Angela of Foligno (1248–1309), and Mechtild of Magdeburg (ca. 1207–ca. 1282), tend to portray our final end as a deeply intimate experience that nevertheless preserves a sense of self. The picture of medieval accounts of immortality that emerges from these diverse discussions is too complex to be comprehensively covered in one 10

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