In Chapter 4, “Bonaventure and the Nine Choirs of Angels,” I examine one of the most condensed discussions in Bonaventure’s text. In Itinerarium 4.4, Bonaventure says that our spirit must be “brought into conformity with the heavenly Jerusalem.” But “no one enters that city,” he adds, “unless that city has first descended into the person’s heart by means of grace.” How does that happen? Well, the heavenly Jerusalem “descends into the heart,” according to Bonaventure, when “our spirit is adorned with nine orderly levels” – levels that correspond, as it turns out, to the nine choirs of angels. In this section, Bonaventure takes two major traditions regarding the nine choirs of angels – one that can be traced to the Celestial Hierarchy of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and the other to a homily by Pope St. Gregory the Great – and condenses them into nine words and nine short phrases. This chapter shows how remarkably concise Bonaventure could be using the methods he had learned for preaching.

After the Gothic wars, significant areas of the Italian peninsula were taken by the newly arrived Lombards. Chapter 5 discusses how convincing Lombard leaders, vacillating between Nicene and Christian Christianity, to embrace one of the available versions of the Christian faith became the goal of the representatives of various sides and how the Lombard religious ambiguity created a special environment in which different doctrines could coexist and compete.

Chapter 4 deals with Nicene–Homoian conversions in Italy under Ostrogothic rule. First it discusses the religious history of the Goths from the fall of the Hunnic empire to their triumph in the war with Odoacer, allowing us to better understand the nature of Gothic Homoianism in Italy and its relationship with the Nicene church. Then it examines conversions under Amal rule and the role of tolerance in their politics and ideology, and finally conversions between the Nicene and Homoian faith in the period of the Gothic War (535–54) and its aftermath.

The Life of Gregory the Great, who died in 604 just a few years after sending Augustine to Canterbury to reintroduce Christianity among the Anglo-Saxons, was written around 705 by an anonymous writer apparently associated with the monastery of Whitby which was an important cultural centre in the seventh century. The work also provides some information about life in Britain. The Latin displays certain syntactical and orthographic idiosyncrasies which may be due to the author or the later scribe.

Bede’s great Ecclesiastical history of the English people is probably the most famous Latin work of the early Middle Ages in Britain. It covers the history from the Roman period, through the withdrawal of the Romans, the reintroduction of Christianity with Augustine of Canterbury, and the lives of saints and kings in different parts of Britain until the beginning of the eighth century. Here are excerpts recounting Gregory the Great’s mission and the spread of Christianity through England, the end of paganism under king Edwin and the story of Cædmon of Whitby and his Old English poems.

The Regularis Concordia was probably written by Æthelwold of Winchester as part of the reform of Benedictine monasteries in England in the late tenth century. It is based on the Rule of St. Benedict and gives guidelines for the monastic lives of monks and nuns. It contains an early example of theatre ritual or drama. An eleventh-century manuscript of the work Cotton Tiberius A. iii contains interlinear glosses in Old English. Here the official preface tells of king Edgar’s role in the Benedictine reform.

The focus of this chapter is Gregory’s ordering of exegetical, spiritual, administrative, intellectual, emotional, and gendered knowledge across his oeuvre. The sections are organised by genre into three groups according to the kind of knowledge ordered within. Gregory’s homilies and commentaries on scripture were primarily intended to convey exegetical knowledge within a framework that prioritised divine law as the primary ordering principle in the social hierarchy. His Pastoral Rule and the Dialogues both employed knowledge of the human passions to teach spiritual truths and offer practical advice for living a Christian life in emotional communities. Gregory’s many letters inscribed his strictly hierarchical social order, with special attention to networks of women of influence outside Rome. A constant feature across Gregory’s oeuvre was the coupling of spiritual and intellectual knowledge for the benefit of all levels of society and for the sake of the church.

This chapter considers the impact of theological doctrine on papal policy toward the Jews in medieval Europe. Specifically, it focuses on the ambivalence toward Jews and Judaism inherent in the Augustinian doctrine of Jewish witness and its expression in the decrees of Gregory the Great, Innocent III, and those popes who first condemned the Talmud in the 13th century.

This chapter considers the theology and spirituality of Gregory the Great, who exerted a profound influence on medieval theology until AD 1150. Key themes discussed include allegorical readings of the Bible, Christology, desire, contemplation and suffering.

This chapter traces the deveopment of Christianity within the late Roman empire, opening with an imperial decree that institutionalized Christianity as the official law of the empire. We examine the close counterparts to intellectual property that existed in the Roman law of late antiquity. With Christianization, however, we also see how semantic formalities and substantive rationalities in Roman law were culturally transformed. Empirical formalities from Roman law persisted, but these were sacramentalized in accordance with Christian understandings. The emphasis on God's creation within Christianity was combined with Hellenistic Roman traditions celebrating wondrous discoveries. Instruments of legal power from the Roman empire were carried forward, but the transformations that took place with Christianization would mean that these instruments of legal power could be deployed in newly intentional ways. In this chapter, we witness the rise of a distinctive order of obligation, one involving faith in legality. This is an order of obligation that combines a deep confidence in the ordering powers of law with tendencies toward acquisitiveness in matters of property and wealth.

This chapter discusses Pope Gregory the Great’s ideas about visions and the afterlife, and how they were received in the early middle ages. To provide a fuller picture of Gregory’s ideas about afterlife visions, the chapter discusses his thought more generally about visions and dreams, especially the two main themes of this thought: the nature of dreams and visions, as ways through which invisible realities might be perceived; and the nature of afterlife visions, especially whether they represented the afterlife allegorically or as it was. The reception of Gregory’s ideas was influenced by the existing tradition of narrating afterlife visions and the way his works were excerpted and abbreviated to suit new needs. This process made Gregory known both as a proponent of the reality of visions and the author of a teaching critical of dreams, and his Dialogues an influential source of imagery for afterlife visions.

More common than Dante’s afterdeath schematic was that of St Thomas Aquinas; both have a supernal heaven, but Thomas’s infernal regions, based on Scripture and tradition, consisted of the limbo of the Fathers, emptied by Christ at his death, at the highest; immediately beneath it was the temporary hell of purgatory; under that was the limbo of infants; and at the very bottom was the region of the perpetually damned.It was believed that both souls in heaven (the saints) and the suffering souls in purgatory could somehow return to the earth’s surface, and it was also believed that some of the departed souls suffered their purging on earth instead of, or as well as, in purgatory (the ghost in Hamlet is a late example). It was assumed that these souls of the ‘saved dead’ had knowledge of what was happening among still-embodied mortals, and they were able (with divine permission) to have immediate means of communication with them.

This chapter traces the development of the Antichrist tradition in both the Eastern and Western church from the time of Origen in the third century until that of Adso in the tenth. In particular it explores the tensions between the Antichrist as both a future and present individual, and as both an individual and collective figure. After a discussion of Origen’s understanding of the Antichrist, it moves to an account of Jerome’s literal and spiritual Antichrist, and Antichrists already present in the world. It outlines the literal and spiritual reading of the Antichrist in the African Donatist Tyconius that set the scene for Augustine’s account of the Antichrist. This is followed by an analysis of Pope Gregory the Great’s understanding of the Antichrist. It also explores the development of Simon Magus as an Antichrist figure, examines how the Last World emperor, Gog and Magog became part of the story of the Antichrist. The chapter ends with a discussion of three crucial influences on Adso in the works of Pseudo-Methodius, Haimo of Auxerre, and Thietland of Einsiedeln