Late medieval thinkers grew newly anxious to include unbelievers in salvation
Evidence
1360s, that at the moment of death all human beings, whether Christian or Moslem, or of whatever faith, enjoyed the direct vision of God and received their everlasting judgment in the light of their response to this experience. Here was a man who belonged to the most conservative of the religious orders, a doctor of divinity whose ways of thought were orthodox, laborious, and unoriginal, putting forward a view which admitted unbelievers outside Christendom to the privileges hitherto, in traditional Christian thought, exclusively reserved for Christian believers. The proposition was condemned and withdrawn, but it was significant. The growing concern about the eternal fate of unbelievers—I do not mean simply a desire to convert them, but a desire to find some means, if it were possible, of including them in the scheme of salvation—is one of the most attractive features of the period. The earlier Middle Ages had been very little, if at all, troubled by the thought that the flames of hell awaited those outside the fold. — R. W. Southern, Western Views of Islam in the Middle…, 437
Categorization
- QUESTION: What drove this unprecedented 14th-century worry about the fate of non-Christians — demographic contact, internal doubt, or theological drift?
- XREF: connects to: Medieval thinkers saw all faiths as destined for eventual reunion in one church