Demotic Religiosity, Monotheism and the Last JudgmentRichard Landes (rlandes@bu.edu)

Elites (potentes) and Commoners (impotentes)

In 859, in the midst of decades when Charlemagne’s effort to create a central empire in Europe collapsed definitively, the Vikings, as was their yearly wont, invadedthe continent. This time they set up camp on an island in the Seine and fanned out to pillage the countryside. This time, however, something unusual occurred. As the bishop ofTroyes, a town in the affected region, wrote:

The Danes devastated the area beyond the Scheldt (to the north). The mixed multitude (vulgus promiscuum) between the Seine and the Loire, taking a collective oath together, vigorously resisted the Danes camped in the Seine. But, because they had imprudently undertaken their collective oath, they were easily massacred (facile interficiuntur) by our more powerful ones (potentioribus nostris).

Aristocrats killed their commoners for organizing to defend the home front from plundering invaders. Where were these, obviously militarily superior troops when the Vikings invaded in the first place? What does it mean for a culture when a major religious authority, Bishop Prudentius, identifies so completely with those who carried out the slaughter as to dryly note they were on “our” side?

From the perspective of our values in civil society, and even in terms of the values expressed by the religious values within that society, this is a painful and deeply self-condemning tale. It is not unlike dozens that occur every month and year around the world. But normally we know about those because a foreign press has reported on it – unfavorably – and the public opinion of “civil societies” gets indignant. In more authoritarian societies, however, such massacres are part of the business of state.1

1 See Sheldon Wolin’s analysis of the Machiavelli’s “economy of violence,” in Politics and Vision, chap. 7.

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I’d like to pair this incident with another, over threecenturies later, namely the discussion at the Third Lateran Council (1179) of a new vernacular translation of the Bible that commissioned by Waldo of Lyon. Walter Map, a mordantly witty cleric, fully at home in the world of courts lay and clerical, responded with the thinking typical of his elite colleagues: to allow commoners to interpret the “sacred page” is to put pearls before swine, such knowledge must (literally) “trickle down” from the heights of erudition. Heconcluded: “They are making their first moves now in the humblest manner because they cannot launch an attack. If weadmit them, we shall be driven out.”2

The Dominating Imperative and the Prime Divider

Both of these incidents illustrate the medieval aristocracy’s adherence to what Eli Sagan calls “the paranoid imperative,”3 that is the belief that dominion is the essential part of the human (political) landscape, and that one’s only choice is: rule or be ruled. Or, as Thucydides had the Athenians tell the Melians:

Our opinion of the gods and our knowledge of men lead us to conclude that it is a general and necessary law of nature to rule whatever one can. This is not a law that we made ourselves, nor were we the first to act upon it when it was made. We found it already in existence, and we shall leave it to exist forever amongthose who come after us. We are merely acting in accordance with it, and we know that you or anybody else with the same power as ours would be acting in precisely the same way.4

2 Walter Map, De nugis curialium (ca. 1182-92), i.31; ed. and tr. M.R. James, C.N.L. Brooke and R.A.B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983) pp. 125-29.3 Eli Sagan, The Honey and the Hemlock: Democracy and Paranoia in Ancient Athens and Modern America (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1991), pp. 235-474 Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War 5:105, Penguin edition, p. 405.

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This worldview, in which those who can do what they will, and those who cannot suffer what they must,5 depends on an (for Sagan, paranoid) assumption that those one subjects would do precisely the same thing, were positions reversed. Since theassumption is not unfounded – indeed, most political “realism” assumes this position – I prefer to call it the “dominating imperative,” and save the “paranoid imperative” for the delirious notion that mere survival demands the extremination of the other.6

Both of these incidents, in 859 and 1179, reveal withinclerical circles, a strain of the dominating imperative despite the radically opposed ethos articulated in both their biblical and theological texts. They treated commonersas (potential) enemies, and kept them from access to the technologies of power: in the Seine valley from the sword, at the Lateran, from the pen. Pauperes, that is impotentes, got protection, but upstart commoners, who engage in conspirationes or who want direct access to the sacred text, these were deeply dangerous populations. In order to survive, the aristocracy understood, they had to maintain a ruthless attitude toward the hostile “other.” Above all, do not let the camel get his nose in the tent.

These attitudes of elites towards commoners is hardly unique to European culture. Indeed, it characterizes most “agro-literate” civilizations, which, no matter what the exigencies of place, all structure a primal division in the culture between the elites and commoners.7 Indeed, one mightreasonably argue that while tribal values have a long durée of

5 Ibid., 5.89, p. 402. In the Mishnah, Rabbi Hanina says: “Pray for peace of the rulers, because if it were not for the fear of them, each would devour the other alive.” Sayings of the Fathers, 3.2. 6 Nazis, Global Jihadis; Landes, Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience (New York: Oxford U. Press, 2011), chaps. 12 and 14.7 Ernst Gellner calls them “agro-literate societies,” Nations and Nationalism(Cornell U. Press, 1983); elaborated by John Hall, Powers and Liberties: The Causes and Consequences of the Rise of the West (UC Press, 1986); see also PatriciaCrone, Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World (Blackwell, 2003); John Kautsky, The Politics of Aristocratic Empires (U of N. Carolina Press, 1982).

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hundreds of millennia, nonetheless prime dividers have a global longue durée of many millennia.

This divider generally stands on three visible pillars:legal privilege, contempt for manual labor, and monopoly on technologies of power. Whatever configurations the prime divider takes or has taken in other societies, in the case under consideration – namely Western Europe in the Central Middle Ages, the widespread acceptance of these prime divider principles informed the dominant tone of discourse among that elite, lay and clerical. The elites of sword and pen.

Such cultures operate predominantly within the framework of zero-sum relations to anyone outside the close circle of family, clan and tribe, and in more stratified societies, anyone below the prime divider. In this world whose imagination is dominated by “the image of the limited good,” zero-sum relations prevailed: your good fortune takesfrom me (if you win, I lose), in order to prevail, I must take from you (I can only win if you lose). This attitude dominated modes of interaction with anyone outside of the circle of primary solidarity. Envy, along with its corollaries – Schadenfreude, crabs in the basket, disdain – play a prominent role social relations.8 One makes oneself bigger by making others look smaller.9

In severe cases, this circle was so small that even one’s neighbors lay outside. The peasant, offered one wish, 8 See Helmut Schoeck, Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior (Liberty Press, 1987). Onthe one hand, Schoeck considers envy an almost genetic human trait, responsible for crucial mimetic behavior in the process of socialization. On the other, those societies that bring this pervasive emotion under some even marginal control show significant productive advantages over ones in which destructive forms of envy (et al.) prevail, and people assume its workings as a default (dominating imperative). 9 “By showing contempt, the envious demean that which makes them feel diminished.” Hotchkiss and Masterson, Why Is It Always About You? The Seven DeadlySins of Narcissism (2003), p. 149. For an excellent exploration of these themes, see the movie Ridicule (1996), directed by Patrice Leconte.

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asks that his neighbor’s goat die. The man offered anything,on condition his neighbor gets double replies, “poke out oneof my eyes.” The assumption of malevolence here, when the dominant mode of perceiving the outsider, produces prime divider societies.10 The belief that, were your neighbor to have twice your wealth, he would use it against you, illustrates Sagain’s “paranoid imperative”: the assumption of ill will from the “other.” Do onto others before they do onto you. As Athenians explained to the Melians: Those who can dowhat they will, those who cannot suffer what they must.” Ruleor be ruled.

Demotic Values and Religiosity

There exists, however, a set of counter-values that findslittle place in the written (i.e., historical) record, but one that represents principles that (I conjecture) the laborers of the land valued. It may, for example, have played an important role in the self-perception of the conspirators of 859. The three main principles include:

equality before the law (and an accompanying discourse of fairness);

dignity of manual labor (the honor of honest labor and the shame of sloth); and

open access to weapons and writing (technology and its power extended to all).11

These demotic principles involve “equal treatment” for a whole people – demos – rather than a society stratified by privilege. Democracies arise in cultures that foster these 10 Indeed when one considers the adage: in the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed is king, one can even venture the observation that, from a positive-sum perspective, kingship is attained through self-mutilation – a remark with which the Samuelite school – no king but God – would certainly agree.11 For a more developed discussion of demotic religiosity, see Landes, Heaven on Earth, chap. 8; “Economic Development and Demotic Religiosity: Reflections on the Eleventh-Century Takeoff,” History in the Comic Mode: The New Medieval Cultural History, ed. Rachel Fulton and Bruce Holsinger (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 101-16. On the egalitarian nature of biblical thought, see Joshua Berman, Created Equal: How the Bible Broke with Ancient Political Thought (Oxford, 2011).

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three demotic principles. Although all democracies are demotic, however, not all demotic polities are democratic.12

The Demotic Bible

The earliest, and for a long time the only detailed record of these demotic principles appears in a religious form, as a revelation from God, laid out in detail in the Hebrew Bible – a cornucopia of demotic myth, historical narrative and legislation, including the earliest narrative of a demotic “social contract” – the covenant at Sinai.13 Inpolitical terms, it is a constitution for that ancient and medieval oxymoron, free peasants.14 Its millennial dream embodies these principles and is at once realistic, if difficult to implement: warriors voluntarily turn the weapons of rapine into tools of honest labor, and the productive man and his family sit under their fig tree and vine with none to make them afraid.15

Isonomia

Despite a lack of elective institutions, no polity in the ancient world so systematically pursued the principles of judicial equality as ancient Hebrew society.16 The Decalogue, allegedly published on stone tablets, and

12 Note that the Greeks in the earliest stages of the emergence of democracy used isonomia, equality before the law, as synonymous with demokratia. Landes, Heaven on Earth, chap. 8.13 For a discussion, see Weinfeld, Social Justice in Ancient Israel and the Ancient NearEast (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1996); Berman, Created Equal.14 Berman, Created Equal, pp. 51-80.15 In millennial terminology, this represents an active transformative apocalyptic scenario leading to a demotic millennium: Isaiah 2, Micah 4;discussed in Landes, Heaven on Earth, pp. 33-36, 215-16, 236-44.. For examples of magical abundance in the millennium, see Syr. Baruch 29:5: “each grape will produce 20 metras of wine, and when one of the saints will take one up, another will shout, “I am better, take me oh saint to bless God.” Papias attributed this saying to Jesus himself. 16 Josephus argues this in the later 1st century CE in his apologetic work, Against Apion II, 15-16, ed. and tr. Thackery, (Loeb Library, Cambridge, 1926) pp. 353-69, esp. 354f.

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applicable to all the members of the community regardless ofstatus or wealth, constitute one of the earliest and most remarkably enduring cases of an isonomic textual community in history. The admonitions to judges insist on impartial justice, regardless of the status of the defendants: one should favor neither the rich (and take bribes) nor the poor(out of pity).17 The principle of equal treatment on these matters of social privilege (as opposed to ritual obligation) is explicitly enunciated at a number of points, in particular with reference to the poor, the defenseless, "the stranger in your midst:"18 “You shall have one ordinance, both for the stranger, and for him that was born in the land.”19 Rulers had no right to dispossess or confiscate property from individuals. Both Moses and Samuel,when faced with objections to their leadership, invoke as their primary defense the claim never to have taken another's ox or a donkey.20 Conversely the image of the unjust the king is one who takes from his subjects against their will: it is the very definition of a king according toSamuel.21 Literacy and Education

Although actual literacy did not reach high proportionsin Israelite society until relatively late (in their history, but not in comparison with other cultures),22 access to the text of the law, and encouragement of public knowledge of the law constitutes one of the highest priorities of the community.23 By the time of the return

17 Ex 23:1-9; Deut 16:18-20.18 E.g. Lev. 19:33f19 Exodus 12:48, Lev. 24:22, Num 9:14, and 15:15-16.20 30.Num 16:15; I Sam 12:3.21 Nathan upbraids David for his adultery with the imagery of taking a poor man's lamb (II Sam 12), and Ahab and Jezebel, the archetypical tyrants, seize a commoner's vineyard and kill him when he refuses to sell to the king (I Kg 21).22 On literacy in ancient Israel, see the review of several books on thesubject by William Schneidewind, “Orality and Literacy in Ancient Israel,” Religious Studies Review 26 (2000), 327-32.23 This raises the issue of what Brian Stock has called “textual communities” which need not have all literate in order for the text to be accessible and play a constitutive role in the life of the

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from the first Exile in the late 6th century BCE, public readings of the Torah (i.e. the Law) took place not only on the Sabbath, but also on the two main market days, Monday and Thursday, accompanied by translations into the vernacular of the day.24 Such customs attest to the community's commitment to carry out the isonomic aims of thetexts that they thus further shaped and transmitted.25 The "people of the Book" thus constitute the largest enduring isonomic "textual community" in recorded history.Manual Labor

The value of labor and its central place in human's destiny appears throughout the bible: indeed the biblical text describes God's first actions labor, from which he rests, and establishes thereby a model of how society shouldwork in this regard. Of all the versions of that universal myth of a past Golden Age, Judaism's alone includes work;26 similarly the future age of perfection envisages a world where justice means people enjoy the fruits of their own labor.27 The ordinances established by Moses clearly place the tiller of the soil at the center of the new society: indeed, Deuteronomy delineates a constitution for a society of free peasants.28 The Wisdom literature repeatedly contrasts the well-being of the worker who eats from the labor of his own hands, and the rich man who lives off the labor of others.29 The commandment of the sabbath embodies collectivity: Implications of Literacy in the 11th and 12th century (Princeton, 1983).24 Josephus insists on the importance of these public readings (Against Apion [n. ], 17f., Loeb ed., p.362-5).25 Joshua Berman, Created Equal: How the Bible Broke with Ancient Political Thought (New York: Oxford, 2008), pp. 109-34. fFor a particularly good example of thedemotic tendencies of rabbinic culture, see the account of the non-violent deposition of the authoritarian (and aristocratic Rabban Gamliel) and the more egalitarian (commoner) rabbis, Yehoshua and Akivah, in Babylonian Talmud, Berachot, 27b-28a; comments in Menachem Fisch, Rational Rabbis, pp. 64-66.26 “And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden towork it and to keep it.” Genesis, 2:15.27 Kalischer, "Die Wertschätzung der Arbeit in Bibel und Talmud," Judaica: Festschrift zu Hermann Cohens siebzigstem Geburtstage (Berlin, 1912), p. 589.28 Berman, Created Equal, pp. 51-80.29 Ecclesiastes, 2:10; 15:12; Wisdom of Solomon, 22:29; Psalms, 104; 128:2.

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the peculiar combination of manual labor and isonomia so characteristic of biblical legislation. It commands work to everyone including the owner of slaves; and it explicitly commands rest to all including servants, Gentiles, even animals.

Psycho-social Dimensions of Demotic ReligiosityAs demotic documents go, the Hebrew Bible offers some

of the most detailed material not merely on the principles, but on the kind of psychological and social attitudes necessary to implement them. Positive-Sum Ethics (win-win interactions). This attitude is

inscribed in the promise God makes to Abraham, the very goal of the covenant: “through you all the familes of theworld will be blessed.” Especially with “outsiders,” thisapproach demands trust of the “other” and creates enormous vulnerability.30 In a sense, one can write a history of the Jews until (and well into) the modern period as the fate of a people commanded to pursue positive-sum relations in a world where zero-sum predominated. Apparently the God who commanded the Jews anticipated the downside: “those who bless you I will bless (win-win); those who curse you I will curse (lose-lose).”31

Positive-Sum Emotions: Biblical legislation stands out among constitutional law in that it tries to regulate emotions:“Thou shalt not covet.” Even Schadenfreude, is limited: “Ifyou see your enemy's donkey crouching under its burden, would you refrain from helping him? You shall surely helprepeatedly with him (Exodus 23:5).”32

Replacing Honor-Shame concerns with those of Integrity-Guilt: the basic distinction between honor and integrity revolves around the dilemma where one must choose between public honor and private guilt on the one hand, and public shameand private integrity on the other. Judah chooses the

30 Sagan, Honey and Hemlock; Adam Seligman, The Problem of Trust (Princeton U Press, 2000).31 Genesis, 12:3. It’s not a symmetrical formula: [mevarechecha avarech;umekalelcha a’or] ררררר רררר ררררררר רררר.32 See Susan Sontag, On the Pain of Others (2003).

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latter in his interaction with Tamar when he passes up anhonor-killing and admits “She was more righteous than I” (Genesis 18:26).

Empathy: The commandment to “love your neighbor and the stranger as yourself” and “not to opress the stranger” isexplicitly predicated on empathy: “For you know the heartof the stranger because you were strangers in Egypt (Exodus, 23:9).”

Replacing “self-help” justice with impartial courts: Self-help justiceis one of the anchors of honor-shame culture and its solidarities: it necessitates a loyalty that overrides matters of justice (intent does not matter), and easily spills over into feud and vendetta.33 While biblical legislation does not eliminate it (reflecting how deeply embedded the “right” to avenge a relative), it inserts the practice of “refuge cities,” to frustrate the “hot pursuit” of the “redeemer of blood,” and establishes courts to adjudicate whether the death resulted from murder or involuntary manslaughter. The absence of such cities in the Second Commonwealth suggests that within half a millennium, Jewish society had replaced self-help justice with courts, a rare (unique) accomplishment amongMediterranean societies.34

On the Dynamics of Moral RevolutionsUsing Appiah’s terminology, biblical narrative and

legislation record one of the earliest efforts to replace anhonor-driven polity with an integrity-driven one, to change by divine fiat the values of the decisive “honor-group.” In that sense, the period of Judges, of self-regulating, egalitarian, social organization, with charismatic judges asthe highest authority, may represent one of the earliest recorded experiments in a demotic polity. That it failed, that the people demanded kings (rather than God as king), that in subsequent generations kings, even when hemmed in by

33 Christopher Boehm, Blood Revenge: The Enactment and Management of Conflict in Montenegro and Other Tribal Societies (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984).34 Seth Schwartz, Were the Jews a Mediterranean Society? Reciprocity and Solidarity in Ancient Judaism (Princeton, 2009).

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biblical injunction, proved hard to control, that elites emerged who oppressed the commoners, does not diminish either the effort, or its long-term contribution to Jewish survival – as no other people from the ancient world – without sovereignty. They did so, not because they had no choice, but because they had the social means to make the choice.

Many of the issues raised here are taken to even greater levels of intensity (and exigence) in the New Testament. From preferring shamed integrity over guilty honor, to “turnthe other cheek”; from give and receive rebuke to “forgive seven times seventy”; from love the stranger and help your enemy’s overburdened donkey, to “love your enemy as yourself.” In one sense, these are apocalyptic ethics, embraced in anticipation of imminent and collective “death” (and, of course, rebirth).35

If, as Sagan suggests, and history confirms, the dominating imperative is a strong political and social force, what would lead (a) people to adopt these integrity-driven positive-sum rules (and suffer the same fate as the Jews)? The history of Christianity and Islam both suggest that these monotheistic movements shifted from demotic to imperial styles, starting with their invidious identity formation about superseding what came before them. Given themillennia-long struggle of Christian and Muslim nations to tame their political elites, the task was unquestionably daunting.36

We Westerners, looking back, might be tempted to view this as a gradual, inexorably cunning, historical process; and, retrospectively, it was. Historically, the point at which a critical mass of people take on the sacrifices and disciplines of demotic principles, has strong positive effects on the res publica: positive sum encourages every kindof cooperation and productivity, even an embarrassment of riches. Weber’s Protestant Ethic may focus of the cognitive 35 See below on the power of the near-death experience in the context ofa Judging God.36 Norbert Elias, On the Process of Civilisation, ed. Mennell et al. (Dublin: UCDPress, 2012); Patricia Crone, God’s Rule: Government and Islam (Columbia U. Press, 2006).

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dissonance later generations of Protestants faced with the problem of predestination, but the four currents he finds most likely to generate the new productive forces are among the most demotic of Protestant denominations: Presbyterians,Quakers, Methodists, and Quietist.37 Culture counts, and demotic culture counts a great deal in generating productivesocieties in which commoners can prosper.38

Weber makes clear that this behavior was not undertakenin order to make wealth, but that rather it resulted from the unanticipated consequences of behavior directed elsewhere. If we run the tape forward into an unknown future (as our actors experienced it), rather than backward towards the elements that proved successful (as we experience it), then our historical actors became “rational” or reasonable only in retrospect. In their present, we find different concerns. Divine Judgment and the Internalization of Guilt

What I’d like to do today is suggest one of their concerns, one which, I think provided a “mechanism” whereby this process of injecting demotic beliefs into prime-dividersocieties. Rather than discuss the issue from the perspective of predestination (Weber’s focus), I’d like to treat a related topic that makes more room for free will: God’s Judgment.

Divine Judgment and EthicsThe belief in a God who judged the dead first clearly

emerged in Egypt, in the Middle Kingdom, in a process whereby funeral practices and after-death narratives about ajudgment process for all, “popularized” matters previously only of concern to Pharaohs.39 The “Negative Confessions” 37 Max Weber, Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, tr. Stephen Kalberg (Routledge, 2001).38 On the larger issues, see David Landes, Wealth and Poverty of Nations (New York: Norton, 1999); Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress, ed. Laurence Harrison and Samuel Huntington (New York: Basic Books, 2001); Schoeck, Envy. On demotic religiosity and its relationship to the economic growth of the early millennium (1000-1300), see Richard Landes,“Economic Development and Demotic Religiosity” (above, n. 11).39 On the “democratization of death” thesis popular among Egyptologists describing this period, see Harold Hays, “The death of the

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that this after-death theology produced, had remarkably demanding standards that parallel the biblical code (which they seem to precede by several centuries).40 In this version of god the judge, the person being judged asks his heart (his integrity?) not to testify against him at judgment before a divine judge who does not know the truth. The monotheistic version of this ethical theology of death has an all-knowing God who seeks out the heart of man, weighs his deeds in the balance, and rewards the good and punishes the bad. As far as I know, this constitutes a fundamental and unique part of all known monotheistic creeds.41

Among religious beliefs “God the omniscient Judge” is unusual. Belief in the Trinity, or the Virgin Birth, or the dictation of the Five Books to Moses, or archangel Gabriel speaking directly to the Prophet PBUH, or the reincarnationsof the Buddha, may have consequences, but they are largely ritual, legal, and often enough, political. Belief in an omniscient and omnipotent Judge, however, may be the single most psychologically intrusive belief imaginable: an omnipotent judge in one’s most private world. The consequences of holding that belief – the moral dilemmas, the demands for restraint, the sense of guilt and inadequacy– pervade the consciousness of the believer. God as Judge ispossibly the single most consequential, least pleasant, mostdisquieting, religious belief on record. It puts the individual face to face with what Jonathan Sacks calls “the most haunting of human questions: How is it possible to live

Democratisation of the Afterlife,” in Old Kingdom, New Perspectives: Egyptian Art and Archeology, 2750-2150 BC, ed. Strudwick and Strudwick (Oxford: Oxbow, 2011), pp. 115-30.40 S.G.F. Brandon, The Judgment of the Dead: An Historical and Comparative Study of the Idea of a Post-mortem Judgement in the Major Religions (New York: Charles Scribner’sSons, 1967); Assmann, Das Tot und Jenseits im alten Agypten (C.H. Beck, 2003), 100-15; Martin Stadler, “Judgment after Death (Negative Confession),” UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology (2008), http://escholarship.org/uc/item/07s1t6kj. 41 There may be some (impersonal) parallels in the Hindu and Buddhist notion of karma.

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the ethical life without an overwhelming sense of guilt, inadequacy and failure?”42

For individuals, on a purely rational, or common-sense,level (much less a selfish one), there is every reason to reject such a belief. There is certainly no immediate advantage to adopting it, and many disadvantages. In a worldwhere one’s very survival depends on learning and playing zero-sum games, a world in which the trust needed for positive-sum interactions makes one terribly vulnerable… in such a world the demands of a just judge – that, at the veryleast, we not cheat – are heavy indeed. Nietzsche compared their weight to the heaviness sea creatures felt when they moved on to dry land.43 A when one considers the self-imposed tyranny of the Jews,44 one gets a sense, for at least one group that took it seriously, of how crushing the burden can become.

Generally, most people who believe God will judge them when they die, tend to procrastinate on taking that issue into account during their life. And unquestionably, the proximity of death does encourage serious reflection: such amoment can sear itself into the consciousness of a person; and deathbed confessions are notorious for their dramatic reversals.45 And no small number of medieval lords spent their lives brutally acquiring their lands, only to give much of it away to the church in the hopes of saving their souls – much to the dismay and indignation of their heirs.46

But near death experiences are rare, except in battle, and there we find comparatively few such conversions.

42 Sacks, Introduction to the Yom Kippur Mahzor (Jerusalem: Koren, 2012), p. x.43 Genealogy, II. 16.44 “An honest reading of the account of Exodus and Numbers cannot help but reveal that the tyranny Israel was freed from, namely that of Pharoah, was mild indeed in comparison to the tyranny of Yahweh to whichthey were about to submit themselves. Donald Redford, Egypt, Canaan, Israel (Princeton, 1993), p. 422.45 Certainly one dimension of the philosopher’s art of dying comes from having the clean conscience of someone who has nothing to hide.46 Barbara Rosenwein, Rhinoceros Bound: Cluny in the Tenth Century (U. of Pennsylvania, 1982).

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The belief does, however, offer consolation, especiallyfor those who cannot do what they will and therefore suffer what they must. Indeed, God the Judge is one of the most powerful answers to the problem of theodicy, that agonizing question which those without honor more often bemoan than those with it. To those without the power to regain or enforce honor, to those who lose hard zero-sum games, this belief in an equitable divine Judge offers great comfort. Ifvengeance is the Lord’s, at least someone will take the vengeance denied in the present where the evil flourish.

The hard audience to imagine getting serious about these ethical imperatives – and in some ways, the most important – is not among what Nietzsche would call the resentful slaves who drown their sorrows in fantasies of omnipotent revenge and delight in the prospect of seeing thepain inflicted by divine vengeance.47 The difficult audienceis among those who could and did what they willed, the blondbeasts, who preyed on the weaker with abandon and joy, impervious to the sickening effects of “bad conscience.”48 Given the rewards of abusing power and the costs of moral restraint, judgment fantasies about something that happens off the human and historical stage have generally limited impact on individuals.

Last Judgment and the Demotic ApocalypseThe one form of belief in God the Judge that could (and

did) have a major impact on the public life of the society was a belief in an apocalyptic Last Judgment. In this version of “God the Judge,” the Judgment comes all at once, publicly, for everyone, at the end of Time. Whether anticipating a subsequent earthly millennium for those who find favor in God’s eyes, or an eschatological cataclysm that destroys thephysical universe, all monotheists believe that at some point God would publicly judge the quick and the dead, reward thegood and punish the bad. Above all, this judgment was public: the good rewarded – justified! – the bad punished –

47 Ibid., I.15.48 “Schlechtes Gewissen”: Genealogy of Morals, II.12.

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visibly! – the Day of the Lord, the Day of Judgment, of Wrath, of Vengeance, of Pleasure.

The aristocracy, lay and clerical, had many reasons to find these apocalyptic beliefs extremely threatening. They became receptacles for all the resentments and suppressed anger of the losers. They also has a distinct quality of social and political subversion: An eleventh century text from Aethelbert’s time:

For then will end the tyranny of kings and the injustice and rapine of reeves and their cunning and unjust judgments and wiles. Then shall those who rejoiced and were glad in this life groan and lament. Then shall their mead, wine and beer be turned into thirst for them.49

A 19th century recollection from the slave South:There’s a day a-coming! I hear the rumbling of the chariots, I see… white folks’ blood a-running on the ground like a river and the dead heaped up that high! OLord! Hasten the day when the blows and the bruises andthe aches and the pains shall come to the white folks… O Lord! Give me the pleasure of living to that day.50

In holy of holies of all demotic eschatology resides a public Last Judgment in which all accounts are settled once and for all. On it, countless generations of wronged and crushed humans have deferred their hopes for payback.

In countless ways, the Last Judgment, promotes status egalitarianism – honor(s) count for naught in this moral meritocracy. We all stand before God, stripped of pretense. Kings and warriors and bishops, who had the means to hide their misdeeds and took advantage of it, go to hell, and thehonest commoner goes to heaven. This accounts for the distinctly egalitarian dimension of most millennial visions.49 Byrhtferth’s Manual, ed. S. J. Crawford, Early English Text Society, Original Series177 (London,Humphrey Milford, 1972), p. 242 , lines 3–9.50 Words of Aggy, a Southern slave cook quoted in Mary Livermore, My Story of the War (Hartford,1889), cited in Scott, Domination and the Arts, 5; italics mine.

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Thus, in the highly unusual (but not so rare) cases where this marginal discourse (Scott calls it a “full-throated private transcript,”) breaches the public transcript, movingfrom the periphery to the center of the public sphere, it takes on a tremendous force, overriding all kinds of inhibitions themselves founded on the fear of later consequences, across the socio-political scale, from minimi to maximi.

Whereas judgment at individual death means “pie in the sky by and by” or what Marx referred to as the “opiate of the masses,”51 Last Judgment meant total justice, and in apocalyptic conditions, total justice now! No wonder responsible ecclesiastics like Isidore of Seville preferred the former. At the end of his chronology of the Age of the World, with the world 5813 years old, and the year 6000 lessthan two centuries away), Isidore concluded with the following, oft-cited, caveat meant to discourage apocalypticoutbreaks: “The remaining time of the world is beyond the reach of human investigation… Whoever leaves this world, forhim it is the end of the world.”52

Apocalyptic moments, however, when a population believes there will be no tomorrow, unleash powerful forces that literally “ride” the believer.53 In some cases, it unleashes baser instincts, orgies of self-indulgence, often at the expense of others. In the demotic cases, however, where reigned however briefly the collective hallucination that the cosmic ruler was about to enter heavenly court and judge humankind, it triggered exceptional cases of conversion to a moral life and fellow feeling, a kind of holy anarchy.

51 Landes, Heaven on Earth, chap. 1.52 Isidore of Seville, Chronica maiora, MGH AA, XI, p. 481; Landes, “Lest the Millennium be Fulfilled: Apocalyptic Expectations and the Pattern ofWestern Chronography, 100-800 CE," The Use and Abuse of Eschatology in the Middle Ages, ed. W. Verbeke, D. Verhelst, and A. Welkenhuysen (Katholieke U., Leuven, 1988), pp. 165-68. On the contribution of this strain of thoughtto the emergence of purgatory, see Le Goff, La naissance du purgatoire (Paris: Galimard, 1981), chap. 53 On apocalyptic beliefs “riding” believers as a rider does a horse, see Henri Desroche, Sociologie de l’espoir, pp. 145-59.

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Agathias, the 6th century Byzantine chronicler describes the behavior triggered by an earthquake. Roosters crowed and mass audiences paid heed.

At the time, however, there was no one who was not greatly shocked and afraid. Litanies and hymns of supplication were everywhere to be heard, with everyonejoining in. And things that are always promised in words, but never carried out in deeds, were at that time readily performed. Suddenly all were honest in their businessdealings, so that even public officials, putting aside their greed, dealt with law-suits according to the law, and other powerful men contented themselves with doing good and abstaining from shameful acts.

Some, changing their life-style completely, espoused a monastic and mountain way of life, renouncing money and honours and all the other things most pleasing to men. Many gifts where brought to the churches, and by night the most powerfulcitizens frequented the streets and cared for those wretched and pitiful people who lay crippled on the ground, providing all that they needed in food and clothing. But all this was limited to that fixed space of time in which the terror was endemic [i.e., the apocalyptic moment]. As soon as there was some respite and relief from danger, most people reverted to their normal ways.54

Chrysostom described the impact of an earthquake that occurred over a century earlier:

When the earthquake happened, I wonder[ed]: Where now is rapine? where cheating? where unjust rule? where luxury? where dominion? where oppression? where the ravagers of the powerless? where the proud arrogance ofthe rich? where the rule of princes, where the threats,where the intimidated? At one moment He ripped apart

54 Agathios, Historiae, V.5: ed. R. Keydell (Berlin, 1967), 169-70; cited by Paul Magdalino, “The history of the future and its uses: Prophecy, policy and propaganda, in The Making of Byzantine History: Studies dedicated to Donald M. Nicol, ed. Beaton and Roueche (Variorum, 1993), p. 6.

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everything more easily than spider's webs, and the cry of the city was heard and all fled to the church.55

The “everything” that God ripped apart in a moment, was the world of pretense and appearance that constitutes the basis of honor-shame dynamics. At such points, for example, a pagan who had nothing but contempt for the slave religion ofthe Christians, might run, heedless of honor, to the doors of the church for baptism. Augustine describes an event at Constantinople contemporary with Chrysostom.

All fled to the church, the place could not hold the multitude. Everyone, almost with violence, demanded Baptism from whom he could. Not only in the church, butalso in their homes and through the streets and squaresthere was a cry for the saving sacrament, that they might escape wrath, not only the present, but that which was to come.56

No wonder that at least some of Augustine’s episcopal colleagues found in apocalyptic prophecy a key to preaching the gospel:

By noticing and believing the existing signs of the coming, it befits me to hope for it and to distribute this food to believers that they may hope for and love the coming of Him whosaid; “When you shall see all these things, now ye thatit is nigh, even at the doors.”57

Even Chrysostom used earthquakes as a salutary meditation onthe Last (and incorruptible) Judgment:

Think on the tremendous day, which will not be one moment but for all eternity, let the river of fire and the threatenings of wrath and the powers drawing to judgment, the awesome tribunal, the incorruptible judgment, and those things which each has done will be passed before his eyes, nor will

55 John Chrysostom, Homilies on Acts 41 (Easter 400), Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series 1, vol. 11 http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf111.vi.xli.htm. 56 Augustine, Sermo de excidio Urbis, ¶7; ed. and tr. O’Reilly, pp. 68-72.57 Augustine, Epistolae, 198 (Hesychius to Augustine), ¶3; http://www.augustinus.it/latino/lettere/index2.htm.

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there be anyone to help him, no neighbor, no orator, no relative, no brother, father, mother, traveler, not anyone else. Then what will we do. I introduce fear so that I might be spared...58

Apocalyptic Moments and Experiments in Demotic Polities

From Last Judgment to Millennium

I’d like to call this sensibility in which social and caste divisions fall before a profound moral egalitarianism,demotic enthusiasm. These collective near-death experiences become moments when the public honor-group, even if for no more than an afternoon, shifts dramatically towards demotic values, leading even the most ceremonially remote and grandiose emperors to walk barefoot in sackcloth.

In rare cases – only a few of which I can identify withsome modicum of confidence59 – an entire region is taken over for months and even years with outbreaks of these apocalyptic moments of public demotic enthusiasm. In such cases, under these intensified conditions, the apocalyptic moment sets in motion a larger movement, moving beyond brief(passive) eschatological moments that lasted an afternoon, at most a few days, to longer, active millennial ones that sought to consolidate this demotic enthusiasm through collective public agreements (covenants). These millennial movements could last months and years and even, in one rare case, decades.

Like the Last Judgment, this apocalyptically inspired moment of social consensus occurs under the aegis of demoticreligiosity – morally egalitarian, empathic, generous.60 Thebad repent and the good forgive, and both agree to a new

58 Chrysostom, “Sermons on the Parable of Lazarus,” Patrologia Graeca, 48, 1028; translation in John Chrysostom, On wealth and poverty, ed. Catharine P. Roth (St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1984), p. 97. 59 Peace of God (990-1033), Great Alleluia (1213), the two Great Awakenings (1720-40, 1820-40).60 One finds similar sentiments expressed on August 4, 1789. See MichaelFitzsimmons, The Night the Old Regime Ended: August 4, 1789, and the French Revolution (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2003); Landes, Heave on Earth, pp. 256-59.

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beginning in the way they interact with others: for a brief moment, integrity wins out over honor: “even public officials, putting aside their greed, dealt with law-suits according to the law, and other powerful men contented themselves with doing good and abstaining from shameful acts.”

The Great Alleluia that swept northern Italy in the course of 1233 represents such a case. It has all the elements of such demotic movements: paroxysms of public confession, attrition, repentance and reconciliation, climaxing in the mutual forgiveness of sworn enemies, their embrace and commensality. Such moments produced resounding choruses of Alleluiah! from the bystanders who took such expressions of amity as nothing short of miraculous.61

The Wave of Peace Assemblies in 1033The movement I think deserves the most attention in

this sense is the Peace of God. In my reading, these assemblies rode on wave upon wave of apocalyptic moments associated with the advent of the year 1000/1033.62 The “councils” assembled in open fields, marked by large (huge?)crowds gathered in the wake of relic processions through thecountryside. The texts speak of an atmosphere of expansive religious enthusiasm that resembles the more detailed accounts of the Great Alleluia: miracles, shouts of joy, singing of psalms. Raoul Glaber’s account of the wave of councils that marked 1033, which he explicitly dates as the Millennium of Passion and tells us that many of the wiser ofthe age, after the passage of 1000, had targeted as another moment of great wonders, offers a particularly powerful description of the Peace as millennial moment.63

61 Salimbene is the major contemporary witness; see Augustine Thompson, The Year of the Alleluia: Preachers and Preaching During the Great Devotion of 1233 (UMI, 1988).62 Landes, “Can the Church be Desperate, Warriors be Pacifist, and Commoners Ridiculously Optimistic? On the Historian’s Imagination and the Peace of God,” in Center and Periphery: Studies on Power in the Medieval World in Honor of William Chester Jordan, ed. Katherine L. Jansen, G. Geltner and Anne E. Lester (Leiden, 2013), pp. 79-92.

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In Glaber’s narrative, the previous three years had been a famine so terrible that even the rich starved and some turned to cannibalism. “People thought that the naturalorder of things was returning to its original chaos.” But with the “millennium of the Passion of our lord…”

The face of the skies began to shine and gentle, beneficent winds to blow, and to show the placid and serene magnanimity of the creator; and the verdant surface of the earth began to bring forth abundant fruit, banishing the famine. Thence assemblies began, therefore, first in parts of Aquitaine, bishops and abbots and other men devoted to the holy religion brought together the entire people, to which they brought the bodies of saints and innumerable reliquaries containing holy relics. From there, throughthe province of Arles and Lyons and thence through all of Burgundy into the furthest reaches of France, in allthe bishoprics, it was determined that in certain places the bishops and the magnates of the entire fatherland would celebrate councils for the same of reforming the peace and instituting the holy faith.

This describes an extended period of apocalyptic time: firstan extended famine and horror – well attested in independentsources – which some experienced as the severe and terrible deeds of a punishing God. The world did not end, at least for the survivors. The response of the authorities, calling assemblies all over, gathering “the entire people” with “innumerable relics,” indicates that the elites were not only participants, but leaders of this movement. Indeed, they took a previously local/regional practice of peace assembly and turned it into a national movement (in ultimas

63 On the “redating” of the millennium, see Glaber, Quinque, 4.1. Other, completely independent sources – Ademar of Chabannes, the amanuensis of Gerald of Cambrai who wrote the Gesta epp cameracensium for this period, the Miracula sci Adelardi – all confirm Glaber in significant detail. See David Van Meter, “The Peace of Amiens-Corbie and Gerard of Cambrai's Oration on the Three Functional Orders: the Date, the Context, the Rhetoric, Revue belge de philologie et d'histoire, 74:3-4 (1996): 633-657.

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partes franciae64). The objections of Gerald of Cambrai to the radical nature of the gatherings – especially their promiscuous use of oaths – offer a good illustration of a “sound mind” responding to the enthused French bishops.65

Glaber emphasizes the enormous and enthusiastic crowds,and connects it to the memory of the previous period of terror.

When the whole multitude of the people heard, they camejoyously, the great, the middling and the small, ready to obey whatever might be commanded by the pastors of the church, not less than if it were a voice from heaven speaking to man on earth. For the disasters of the past time had terrified everyone and they stood in fear of not being able to enjoy the opulence of future fertility.

Afraid that the God who had just punished them so terribly, would withdraw his grace if they should not repent and turn to him, they tried to create a new society.

While the basic characteristic of all peace assemblies was the protection of the unarmed, these councils went further, and tried to put an end to the “license to kill” ofeven the warrior class.66 Indeed they tried again to accomplish what Charlemagne had tried to legislate and failed spectacularly to achieve, namely to put an end to feud.67 Glaber writes: “The most important stipulation was that an inviolable peace should be preserved so that men of all conditions, whatever their previous sins, should be ableto go about unarmed and unafraid.”68 At this point, I 64 An early reference to France as a territory with national boundaries.At this point the common term is rex francorum, and only after the accession of Phillip II (Auguste) in 1180 do the royal documents speak ofrex franciae.65 Duby, Les trois ordres: ou l’imaginaire du feodalisme (Gallimard, 1978), chap. 2; Van Meter, “Peace of Amiens.”66 Warren Brown, “Charlemagne, God and the License to Kill,” in Violence in Medieval Europe, pp. 69-95.67 See Capitulare Missorum Generale (802) ¶32, ed. Boretius, MGH Leges Capit. Francorum I. 97.68 For corroborating evidence from contemporary sources, see Landes, “Can the Church?” pp. 88-91.

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submit, we are dealing with an extremely powerful and remarkably radical political movement that actually thinks it can organize society without self-help justice, without weapons bearers who have “license to kill” in pursuit and defense of honor. This was obviously an ambition completely counter-indicated in terms of the millennia-old cultural forces that dominated the elites of the time, and for some time to come.

Like so many of the more spectacular peace assemblies, miracles played a critical role in infusing the gatherings of 1033 with enthusiasm, and (through that enthusiasm) sanctifying the decisions of the council. Here, given the extreme nature of the conciliar demands, the miracles were indeed crucial to success. Glaber describes their impact:

Everyone was overcome with such ardor [universi tanto ardoreaccensi], that, when the bishops raised their staffs to the heavens, they, with their palms extended to God, unanimously shouted “Peace! Peace! Peace!”

The “everyone” here refers to the demos, the whole people “omnis aeve utriusque sexus, maximi, mediocres ac minimi,” of whom thevast majority – and the most unwonted of presences at the proceedings of church councils – were the minimi. Their cry of peace turned miracles into miracle-demanding69 socio-political fiat: Vox populi vox Dei. Swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks.70

The historian Glaber takes us still further. Indeed he takes us where virtually no other historian of his era brought his audience, namely inside the experience of the masses:

For them [the universi of the previous sentence], it was the sign of a perpetual covenant [signum perpetui pacti] with which they were marrying themselves to God [quod spoponderant inter se et Deum], promising that in five years they would renew this pact in the same admirable way.

69 As Sagan notes dryly: “Paranoia is the problem. The paranoid position[rule or be ruled] is the defense. Democracy is a miracle, considering humanpsychological disabilities.” Sagan, Honey and Hemlock, p. 22.70 On this theme’s unusual place in the literature of the early 11th century, see Landes, Van Meter.

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In other words, these people believe that they are replicating the deeds of the ancient Israelites when they stood at Sinai and vowed a pact with God to create a just society. Thus, behind Gerard of Cambrai’s explicit concern for the inability of the aristocrats to keep their vows, mayhave lain a still more profound anxiety about the spread of public, collective, oath-taking to the commoners.71 In theirown minds, the commoners constituted a “new Israel,” willingto accept God’s demands and gain his rewards, namely, acceptthe principles of integrity and enjoy the abundance of a land at peace.

That I will give rain to your land, the early and the late rains, that you may gather in your grain, your wine and your oil. And I will give grass in your fieldsfor your cattle and you will eat and you will be satisfied.72

Glaber describes the effects of the assembly vows:In that very year there was such an abundance of grain and wine and other produce that one could not have hoped for in subsequent years. Every kind of food shortof meat and the greatest delicacies sold for nothing. It was as if it was the beginning of the great Mosaic Jubilee. The next year, and the third and the fourth were not less abundant.

Riding on the wave of abundance that follows famine, this alliance of elites and commoners added a radical dose of positive-sum behavior to social interaction – trust,

71 “In fact, this movement constitutes for us the essential argument in favor of a transformation in the spontaneous behavior of individuals whobased themselves on religious elements to reorganize the society. And all this vast movement in its duration, spread, and depth, becomes understandable only when we assume a powerful push from the people at its base… a genuinely and entirely new actuality, a phenomenon of the same nature, perhaps, as the sworn associations of the ninth century, but multiplied by a hundred and a thousand...” Dhondt and Rouche, Le haut moyen age, p. 252-53.72 Dt 11:14-15.

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empathy, productive labor, mutual benevolence, renunciation of violence. And the result was one of the earliest clear manifestations of the kind of civil society that Western Europe would eventually generate on a stable basis, some eight centuries later.

Ex post defectu: The Aftermath of Demotic Apocalyptic MomentsWhether a moment, or a period of time, the impact of

believing that one faced the Judge, naked and helpless to hide, that one’s deeds hidden and public, repressed or suppressed, were now under scrutiny, did not last long – at least as far as public behavior was concerned. Backsliding was the order of the day in virtually every account. Glaber’s is perhaps the most extensive and eloquent, and records the backsliding not after a few days, as with Chrysostom’s earthquake,73 but four years (!) after the climactic covenant of the millennium of the Passion:

But alas! The human race, always unmindful of the beneficence of God, from its origins prone to evil, like a dog returning to its vomit, or a pig wallowing in its trough, in many ways [people] broke the oaths they had sworn and, as it is written, “they grew fat and kicked.” (Deuteronomy 32:15) For those same magnates [primates] of both orders began to turn to greed and began to commit many rapacious acts – as theyformerly had done only worse – of greed. And from them to the middling sort, and the lesser sort, by the example of the greats, returned to their depraved behavior. Had anyone ever seen so much incest, adultery, illicit conjugal unions, such concubinage, such imitation of evil occur?74

Moments of demotic enthusiasm are short-lived because the most powerful generator of such moments – the belief in either a final judgment (eschatology) or a fundamental mutation in social dynamics (millennialism) – always prove

73 Chrysostom: “As soon as there was some respite and relief from danger, most people reverted to their normal ways.”74 Glaber, Quinque libri historiarum, IV.5.17.

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wrong. Once these cosmic threats failed to materialize, the initial fire of collective commitment and mutual renunciation passes and believers rapidly cede first to cognitive dissonance, then to backsliding. It took the French revolutionaries less than a decade to substitute propriété for fraternité.75

But that backsliding hardly meant that such moments didnot happen, and that those who participated, especially those who got the raw end of the post-apocalyptic stick, gave up hope that this glorious event, of which they had just shared a small, proleptic, taste, would indeed happen in the near future.76 Nor does it mean that the people who backslid (especially the potentes), didn’t then feel guiltierabout the behavior to which they had returned, as both Isaiah and Glaber put it, like a dog to its vomit. Two generations later, at the time of the “First” Crusade, we have sharp testimony to the condition of warriors who had been “injected” with “bad conscience.”77

75 On the role of fraternité in the fêtes révolutionnaires which Michelet saw as the heart and soul of the revolution (“the tale of the most beautiful days of the Revolution, still credulous, fraternal, clement…”), see Michelet, Histoire de la révolution française, ed. Ernest Flammarion, 5 vol. (Paris: Près L’ Odéon, 1898);trans. Gordon Wright (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), “Introduction de 1868,” p.1; Ozouf, Fêtes révolutionnaires; Landes, Heaven on Earth, pp. 258-59, 301.76 During the second empire, ninety-year-old manual laborer from Nantes, onhis deathbed, “raised his eyes to the sky with a look of ecstasy and murmured ‘O sun of [17]93, I will then die without seeing your rays again!’ ” Story recounted by Gabriel Monod in his introduction to AlbertMathiez, Contributions à l’histoire de la révolution française (Paris: F. Alcon, 1957),i.77 “Day after day his prudent mind was in turmoil, and he burned with anxiety all the more because he saw that the warfare which flowed from his position of authority [militiae suae certamina] obstructed the Lord's commands. For the Lord enjoin that the struck cheek and the otherone be offered to the striker, whereas secular authority [militia saecularis] requires that not even relatives' blood be spared. The Lord warns that one's tunic, and one's cloak too, must be given to the man intending to take them away; but the imperatives of authority [militiae necessitas] demand that a man who has been deprived of both should have whatever else remains taken from him. Thus, this incompatibility dampened the courage of the wise man whenever he was allowed an

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The backsliding, however, has led many historians to dismiss the Peace movement (and most other apocalyptic moments) as insignificant (or non-existant). The study of apocalyptic movements, however, suggests something quite different. We are concerned now with the period known as cognitive dissonance, when the impact of the apocalyptic moment has worn off, and believers must confront the failureof their (sure) expectations. Some of these deeply disappointed but deeply affected people continued to search for their vocation, for the meaning of this covenant they and their parents had sworn: they thronged “like bees to honey” to aristocrats who voluntarily renounced their power and status, and continued to do so for generations. Some of these charismatic leaders commanded large crowds who, precisely in this first century of the new millennium, stepped boldly “onto the stage of public events,” and whose “eminently respectable beginnings” [if not also continuations ] began with the mobilization of populace in the Peace of God movement.78

And while some of the more entrepreneurial of these refugees from failed apocalyptic time fashioned urban and rural communes, refashioning covenants into corporations andcontracts, others took to the roads or to isolated communities to live the vita apostolica, or to reclaim Jerusalemfor the Lord. In many cases they undertook their novel labors to the resounding cries of an aroused people that now, even after the Peace had failed, believed that they hadbeen chosen to enact the salvific gesta Dei.

But that topic is for another paper.opportunity for quiet reflection. But after the judgement of Pope Urban granted a remission of sins to every Christian setting out to overcome the Gentiles, then at last the man's energies were aroused, as though hehad earlier been asleep; his strength was renewed, his eyes opened, and his courage was redoubled. For until then ... his mind was torn two ways, uncertain which path to follow, that of the Gospel, or that of theworld.” Gesta Tancredi in expeditione Hierosolymitana, 1 (Recueils des Historiens des Croisades. Historiens occidentaux: vol. 3, pp. 605-6); tr. in Marcus Bull, Knightly Piety and the Lay Responseto the First Crusade: The Limousin and Gascony, ca.970-C. 1130 (Oxford, Clarendon, 1993), p. 3-4.78 R.I. Moore, “Family, Community and Cult on the Eve of the Gregorian Reform,” Transactions, Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 30 (1979): 46.

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