Dominion of God: Christendom and Apocalypse in the Middle Ages by Brett E. Whelan (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 327 domness prevails” (474), and that the rational universe that Aratus espouses was frequently used as the counterpoint to the radical new theories of the cosmos being advocated by Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, and represented by the work of Lucretius. “Sleeping with the Enemy: Tommaso Ceva’s Use and Abuse of Lucretius in the Philosophia novo-antiqua (Milan 1704),” by Yasmin Haskell, is a fitting companion to Gee’s, because, like Gee, Haskell examines a lesser known astronomical poet’s response to Lucretius. The poet is Tommaso Ceva (1648– 1737), a mathematician and rhetorician at the Jesuit College of Brera. Haskell painstakingly draws out each allusion to Lucretius’s work in Ceva’s Philosophia novo-antiqua and explains how Ceva manipulates Lucretian language to rebut and satirize Lucretian ideals. She goes on to examine Ceva’s attention to audience and his pedagogical approach. This is a solid contribution to the volume and does much to illuminate and elevate Ceva’s writings within the larger community of anti-Lucretian of writers. JENNIFER A. T. SMITH, English, UCLA Brett E. Whelan, Dominion of God: Christendom and Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2009) 328 pp. The Book of Revelation, with its vivid imagery and obscure prognostications, has long captured and confounded the Western imagination and its expectations concerning the end of history. The Church Fathers offered multiple scenarios of what would happen in the last days, which were handed down and commented upon through the centuries. Writers of the High Middle Ages, however, added subsequent layers of expectation to the patristic picture, and in some cases radically altered it. A constellation of theologians, mystics and ecclesiastics linked apocalyptic expectations with “the expansion a certain kind of Christian religious community—Christendom, the union of right-believing and right-practicing Christians assembled under Christ’s deputy shepherd, the popes of Rome” (2). This new theology of history broke with the patristic tradition in a crucial respect by correlating biblical history, and allegorical interpretations thereof, with post-biblical events. This is the thesis of Brett Whalen’s new book, Dominion of God: Christendom and Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, in which he traces the interplay of prophecy and politics over the course of nearly four hundred years. From the eleventh century onward, it was widely believed that the papacy would reform the Western Church, restore communion with the Greeks, and secure the holy places of Jerusalem from Saracen control, prior to the consummation of the world. But Rome, in the medieval imagination, could also stand for Babylon, and with time the disappointment of apocalyptic expectations increasingly directed theorizing against the existing order and its ecclesiastical structures. Dominion of God is divided into eight chapters, which progress chronologically and thematically from the origins of the papal monarchy in the eleventh century through the gloomy apocalypticism of the late fourteenth. The architects of papal monarchy, with their emphasis on Petrine claims and their increasing disputes with the Greek Church, unwittingly took “the first steps toward an innovative theology of history that would impact medieval Europe for the following three hundred years” (41). The origins of the crusading move- REVIEWS 328 ment, the subject of chapter 2, made several important contributions to the development of this new theology of history. In the first place, “the still forming papal monarchy irrevocably stamped the memory of crusading with its own image,” thus tying the two phenomena together (45). Writers such as Guibert of Nogent lent an apocalyptic content to Urban’s speech at Clermont, and saw the victory of Western Christians in Jerusalem as a special sign of divine election, in contrast to the defeats of the Greeks, who had suffered under the Saracens on account of their sins. But crusader defeats “raised uncomfortable questions in Latin theology of history,” and illustrated the great burden of election (70), for “[t]he Lord would single out Western Christians for special chastisement when they rejected God’s laws” (68). Whalen observes that the crusades marked the beginning of the notion of Christendom united in common effort against the non-Christian world, and that possession of Jerusalem was the “sine qua non” of all future apocalyptic scenarios (71, 65–66...