BEYOND THE BODY AND BACK AGAIN: VISIONS OF OTHERWORLDLY JOURNEYS IN CAROLINGIAN THEOLOGY

Abstract

This essay analyzes the mechanics of temporary journeys to the afterlife in Latin texts from the ninth century, the period typically associated with the birth of a medieval visionary genre. Sometimes framed as near-death experiences, sometimes as simple dreams, journeys to an otherworldly landscape were primarily intended as admonitions to the living, but in crossing the boundary between living and dead, the visionary's own soul and body experienced a problematic disjuncture. In contrast to previous scholarship, which has analyzed early medieval visions primarily as political texts, as contributions to a Christian belief in purgatory, or as forerunners to later medieval classics like Dante's Divine Comedy, this study uses visions as windows onto the theology of the soul-body union. The first part surveys important discussions that preceded and informed Carolingian visions of the afterlife (including Augustine's dialogues on the soul, the famous Merovingian Vision of Barontus, and various Insular texts with otherworldly encounters). The second part shows how, against these earlier models, Carolingian visionary authors broke with conventions in order to safeguard the stability of the soul's containment within its earthly body — the very same doctrinal issue that appears with mounting urgency in treatises on the soul produced in the middle decades of the ninth century. A key intervention of the essay is to argue for greater attention to the connections between Carolingian visionary texts and theological tracts, a point often overlooked in a field that has emphasized the imaginative narratives of visionary literature as fundamentally distinct from the ostensible conservativism of early medieval theology.