Eternal light and earthly concerns

Belief and the shaping of medieval society

Paul Fouracre, Stephen Mossman, C. E. Beneš, T. J. H. McCarthy, Jochen Schenk

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781526114006
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

In early Christianity it was established that every church should have a light burning on the altar at all times. In this unique study, Eternal light and earthly concerns, looks at the material and social consequences of maintaining these 'eternal' lights. It investigates how the cost of lighting was met across western Europe throughout the whole of the Middle Ages, revealing the social organisation that was built up around maintaining the lights in the belief that burning them reduced the time spent in Purgatory. When that belief collapsed in the Reformation the eternal lights were summarily extinguished. The history of the lights thus offers not only a new account of change in medieval Europe, but also a sustained examination of the relationship between materiality and belief.

1

Beginnings

The burning of lights in Christian worship has its origins in Scripture. Honouring the saints with lights, and using lights to commemorate the dead more generally, were, however, practices arguably imported into Christianity from the funerary customs of the ancient world. The veneration of light is in fact common in religions across the world in which light symbolises good and darkness is associated with evil, or light with life and darkness with death. In Hinduism, for example, light represents divinity and the gods of heaven, whereas darkness portends the presence of demons. Light is even hidden in sound. Chanting and lighting propitiate God and protect from evil. Lamps and lights thus play an important part in the ritual of Hindu worship, and one of the most important Hindu festivals is a festival of light, Diwali. In ways that have striking parallels in the Christian world, in Hinduism the provision of material for lighting, that is, the lamps and the fuel, could have significant social and economic consequences. In Andhra Pradesh in south-east India in the central Middle Ages merchants donated lamps and cattle to temples, the cattle providing the ghee (clarified butter) which fuelled the lamps. Fifty cows were apparently needed to produce enough ghee to keep each lamp perpetually alight, and the cattle-herding which the provision required was a factor in bringing local hunter- gatherers into the pastoral economy.¹ Again with strong parallels in medieval Christian societies, the endowment of Hindu temples served to legitimise the status and authority of rulers and elites. In the southern Coromandel (a region roughly corresponding to modern Tamil Nadu) merchants identified themselves with local communities by donating to temples, and, as in Andhra Pradesh, they gave the livestock that would produce ghee. The military also donated treasures from conquests and raids, and this had the effect of pumping money into the local economy through the temples. Local assemblies managed this wealth and made decisions about the allocation of temple income to provide for the lamps.² Lighting for religious purposes was thus integral to social and economic organisation. This book, which is about the material consequences of belief, could in fact have been written about religions other than Christianity, but my aim is to deal specifically with Christianity in order to show the impact the provision of lighting had upon the development of West European societies. The reason for doing that is that the social and economic effects of putting this particular belief into practice are an important factor in development, but one that has hardly been recognised.

In this chapter I will look at both the scriptural and the customary origins of the use of lights in the Christian Church, noting how and why that use was contested before it became fully established in the fifth century. I will then follow the spread of lighting practices against the background of economic changes at the end of the Roman period, for these changes would restrict the means by which many Europeans could provide for the lights. Here we will start with the situation in Rome before moving into other areas. Let me begin with Scripture, namely the Mosaic books in the Old Testament. The subject of light in worship is introduced in Exodus 27:20–1 (and repeated in Leviticus 24:2), in which God instructs the children of Israel to bring the purest olive oil so that the lamp before the tabernacle might burn at all times. Aaron, the brother of Moses, and the sons of Aaron were charged with collecting the oil and maintaining the flame. This charge would remain amongst the Israelites for all time.³ In Judaism keeping a flame burning before the tabernacle became essential practice, and down to the present synagogues have a perpetual light in the form of a flame in front of the ark in which the scrolls of the Torah are kept. In Judaism it was essential to have lamps of sufficient capacity to burn throughout the Sabbath, for tending them would have counted as work. Several of these ‘Sabbath lamps’ have been found in Britain from the period prior to the expulsion of the Jews in 1290.⁴ Following Leviticus, there was also concern to ensure the purity of the oil used. The Babylonian Talmud said that three grades of oil could be extracted from the olives. Only the first pressing could be used for the lamps as this contained the least sediment. The olives should not be milled as this process in particular produced sediment.⁵ Where the oil came from, how it was distributed, and whether there was a shortage in northern Europe, we cannot tell. The original ‘shortage miracle’ was of course the miraculous replenishment of the lamps of the menorah, an episode of the Maccabean revolt when one day’s oil burned for eight days.⁶ Despite the fact that the celebration of this miracle evolved into the Hanukkah festival, which is a festival of light, miraculous replenishment does not occur again. The lamps, the oil and the lighting would nevertheless be mentioned fairly frequently in the Torah, namely in the Books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, less so in subsequent books, and but rarely in the New Testament. In the latter, light is much more a metaphor for the Truth than it is a matter of paraphernalia and practice, although the two, oil for lamps and truth-metaphor, do come together in the parable of the wise and the foolish virgins (Matthew 25).

Islam is more in step with the New Testament here in taking a metaphorical approach to light. In the sura ‘Light’ in the Qur’ān (24; 34–6), ‘Allah is the light of heavens and the earth. His light may be compared to a niche that enshrines a lamp, the lamp within is a crystal of star-like brilliance.’ It is envisaged that this lamp is lit ‘from a blessed olive tree’.⁷ But although such lamps were to be found in ‘temples’ (i.e. mosques), this was not an injunction that lights should burn there at all times. It did not require a light for a mosque to be a place of worship, and lights did not have to be fuelled by olive oil. And later, when Islam spread to regions in which there were few or no olives, to Egypt for example, no effort seems to have been made to import olive oil. Lamps were indeed important in Islam, and providing for the lights was, as will be shown in a later chapter, a duty of the faithful, but in general lighting in mosques was of a utilitarian rather than symbolic nature.⁸ Evening prayers required the mosque to be illuminated, and lamps were needed for those wishing to read the hadīth, the collected sayings of the Prophet. The Qur’ān notably incorporates elements of the Mosaic books of the Old Testament, but these borrowings are not detailed enough to include many of its injunctions, and in general the Qur’ān inclines towards the interplay of the metaphorical and the literal, rather than towards the symbolic. There is a contrast here with Christianity in which what is symbolic in Scripture is sometimes built up into sacramental practice.

Altogether there are over two hundred references to oil, lamps and lights across the Old and New Testaments. Perhaps the most startling of the references to keeping a flame burning on the altar (specified in Leviticus 6:12 as a fire of wood kindled from the embers of the previous day) comes in Leviticus 10:1–2, 6 (and repeated in Numbers 3:4), where Nadat and Abiu, two sons of Aaron, let the fire go out, and then kindled it afresh, thus offering, ‘strange fire’ to the Lord, and so they failed in their charge. As a punishment they were incinerated and God told Aaron’s family not to mourn them. This reference we see picked up in Francia at the Council of Aachen, held in the year 836. There, the fire for the burnt offering was changed to the flame of the lamp, and the passage was used to upbraid a wayward king who was in danger of extinguishing the flame of the faith by allowing the Church to be despoiled of its property.⁹

In the early Christian church there was some reluctance to incorporate the burning of lights into worship. At a stage when doctrine was still inchoate there was uncertainty about how to read the Old Testament, and over whether the books inherited from the Jews had been superseded by the oral testimony to Christ. Saint Paul had been hostile to the Old Law, emphasising the novelty of Christian truth. The Gnostics tended to pick and choose texts, Jewish or otherwise, according to their insight, and this meant on occasion disregarding Mosaic precept in favour of a newly revealed Truth. Writing in about the year 144 Marcion went further in insisting on a complete discontinuity with the Jewish tradition. Struck by stories such as that of the fatal punishment of Nadat and Abiu, Marcion argued that the God of the Jewish scriptures was so malignant and spiteful that he was unworthy to be the father of Jesus. The Old Testament should thus be rejected in its entirety. It was Origen, writing at the very beginning of the third century in reaction to the Gnostics and in particular to refute Marcion, who would argue that the Old Testament should be read in the light of the New. That is to say, the Gospel embraced the Law and the Prophets as Moses and the Prophets were filled with Christ’s spirit.¹⁰ Origen’s line of thought won the day and opened the way for an acceptance of Mosaic precepts, and to a Judaising tendency in the development of ritual: as can be seen at the Council of Aachen, the duties of the Christian priesthood would draw inspiration from the charges laid upon the sons of Aaron.¹¹

The theological bar to the use of light in worship may have been broken, but there remained unease with the pagan connotations of the association between light and veneration.¹² ‘Pagans’ (undifferentiated in Christian sources) had used torches in processions, lit lamps at the doors to their houses, and burned candles and lamps at tombs, both in funeral ceremonies and for commemoration. The sacred person of the emperor was represented as flanked by torches in the Notitia Dignitatum, and there was a recognised group of torchbearers (lampadarii) who accompanied the imperial family.¹³ Origen’s contemporary Tertullian voiced concern about how Christians should deal with such aspects of pagan behaviour and custom. More Christians, he said, were lighting lamps outside their doors than pagans. It is the pagans, who have no light, i.e. truth, who need lamps, not the Christians who follow ‘the light of the world’ (i.e. Christ).¹⁴ Christians cannot join in the festivities for Caesar, but should remain loyal. They are in fact more loyal than the hypocrites who hang bright lamps high in the halls yet plot against the authority of the emperor.¹⁵ Tertullian seems to have been reacting against a rising tide of accommodation to existing Graeco-Roman customs that, in hindsight, looks inevitable as the numbers of Christians grew. This can be seen in terms of political rhetoric in w...