Julian of Toledo

Julian was born in Toledo about 642, of a Jewish family that had converted to Christianity, a detail his medieval biographer records without embarrassment, and one that mattered in a kingdom where the status of converts was constantly under debate. He was educated in the cathedral school of Toledo under Bishop Eugenius II, took monastic vows, and in 680 became archbishop of Toledo, the primate of the Spanish church.

He held the see for ten years and used them hard. He presided over four national councils, the Twelfth through Fifteenth Councils of Toledo, reorganized the Spanish liturgy, and defended the independence of the Spanish bishops when Rome objected to the wording of one of his doctrinal statements. He revised the statement, sent it back, and did not concede the principle.

He was also close to the throne. He crowned King Ervig, and the councils he ran did a good deal of the kingdom's legal business.

His lasting book is the Prognosticon futuri saeculi, a Foreknowledge of the World to Come, written about 688. It is the first systematic treatment in Latin of what happens after death. Book one asks about the origin of death and why the righteous die. Book two treats the state of souls between death and the resurrection. Book three takes up the resurrection of the body and the last judgment.

Julian did not invent the material. He assembled it, mostly out of Augustine, Gregory the Great, Cyprian, and Jerome, and arranged it as a set of questions with answers drawn from the fathers. But nobody had done that before, and once he had done it, the book became the standard reference on the last things for the whole Middle Ages. Hundreds of manuscripts survive. Later writers on heaven, hell, and the intermediate state, including the makers of the great glosses, worked from Julian's arrangement whether they credited him or not.

He wrote other things: a History of King Wamba, an unusually vivid piece of contemporary reporting on a rebellion and its suppression; a book against those who denied that the sixth age of the world had come; treatises on grammar and on the interpretation of contradictory passages of Scripture.

He died on 6 March 690, and was buried in Toledo beside his teacher Eugenius. His pupil Felix wrote the short life that is nearly all we know of him.

Sources: Julian of Toledo, Prognosticon futuri saeculi and Historia Wambae regis; Felix of Toledo, Vita Iuliani; The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913); Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. IV.