We are justifiably afraid of fire. Fire burns and when things burn they are damaged or destroyed. Fire has ravaged powerful cities such as ancient Rome and seventeenth century London. Wildfires have recently destroyed huge areas in drought-stricken parts of the world, bringing destruction, death and terror to the people who live there. Fire hurts and burns, leaving terrible scars and injuries. Fires destroy our homes and possessions. But the destructive power of fire is also something that can produce life. I was struck recently by the comments of a friend here in Sweden talking about the positive impact of a large forest fire which swept through the forests in the north of Sweden some years ago. It was horrendously destructive, destroying tens of thousands of trees and injuring and killing wildlife and people. And yet my friend, who at that time worked for the organisation that manages the forests, explained to me (an ignorant city dweller) that the forests depend on fires like these to grow and develop. Usually of course the fires are managed and kept within safe bounds and clearly this one wasn't! But the effect of such fires, controlled or not, is to is strip away the dead and old material in the forest, to allow new, young life to emerge. And the trees grow back, stronger and better and the wildlife returns and and forms a new ecology. And life goes on and flourishes better and stronger because of the fires. Something like this effect of fire, the rooting out and burning up of the old and tired, lies as the background for the trial scene in the Testament of Abraham, the ancient Jewish comic novel which describes the attempts of Abraham to escape the inevitability of death. Abraham's angel guide, Michael, shows Abraham what happens to souls after they die and Abraham passes through the gate of heaven at the East of the world, where he sees the souls of the dead being judged. He discovers that their eternal fate is decided partly on the basis of how the record of their lives responds to the divine fire blown from a trumpet held by Puriel, the 'angel of fire'. Their record of actions while alive, their 'works', are subjected to a 'trial by fire'. Good deeds survive the flames. They are clearly made of solid stuff, worthy and true, like a precious metal. Bad deeds are consumed by the flames, burnt up entirely, reduced to ashes. These are the deeds done in disregard for God's Law, the deeds born of selfish desire and Godless passions. So, as the dead and ancient material of the forest which inhibit the growth of the new are stripped away by the forest fires, here Puriel's fire consumes the dead and dying parts of individual human lives. The Testament of Abraham of course is not trying to say that the souls so-judged pass through to Paradise, better and wiser people; rather that those who see their life's work burn up pass directly to a place of horrendous torment and punishment (without passing go!). There is no sense here that these flames are intended to purify the souls who pass through them but, like the Sorting Hat in Harry Potter, they decide where the souls belong, in Paradise or in the 'other place'. But it was this very idea of flames that consume the dross, the old, the broken and the godless and leave the good and the new and the Godly unharmed that led some in the early church to imagine that what might happen after death is that souls would face the fire of judgement, not to destroy them but, like the beautiful forests of Sweden, to make them better. It was ideas like those we find in the Testament that led eventually to the birth of the idea of purgatory, to the idea of the flames that purify. In this post we come close to that place where such powerful ideas began to emerge.
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The Testament of Abraham and the Threefold Judgement of God #2 Once, Twice, Three Times a Sinner3/10/2016 Courts can be rather intimidating places. They should be - after all the dispensation of Justice is extremely important. The judges are usually imposing figures, the courtrooms are hushed and respectful, the clerks and officials note and record everything and dispense justice quickly and efficiently. There is no room for disagreement with the final decision or sentence and bad behaviour in the courtroom is not tolerated. Even the furniture of the court emphasises the solemn importance of what is going on there, with the judge usually seated 'up on high' and the accused 'spotlighted', sat or stood separately, in a place reserved for them, alone and isolated from family and friends. But all of this is nothing compared to the scene of post-mortem judgement described in the Jewish/Christian writing known as the Testament of Abraham. At one point in this ancient Jewish story, in which Abraham tries (with great comic effect) to evade Death, we read how Abraham follows the archangel Michael through the gates of heaven and find himself at the tribunal where the dead are judged. There he finds an awesome, even terrifying vision of divine justice in action, a scene that includes a magnificent judge, gigantic books, glowing tables, scary angels and of course thousands of souls being weighed, burned and whipped! And this, he is told, is just the first stage! This wonderful comic novel originally written by a Jewish writer and then used and preserved (and perhaps adapted) by Christians, dating from perhaps the first or second centuries A.D., provides a wonderful insight into how ideas about heaven and hell and the judgement that sends us there, were developing in the first centuries after the birth of Jesus. In this post I try to describe the elements of divine justice as shown to Abraham and what they mean and why they are there. Sometimes looking just isn't enough, you just have to jump in to get the full benefit. Exercise is like that. You can watch sport all day long but you won't lose a kilo in weight or improve your fitness level one iota unless you actually take part. Travel is like that too. You can watch any number of travel programs on TV but it doesn't mean you have actually been to those places. You have never experienced the sights, sounds and scents that make those places so distinctive and memorable. That's what Tundale discovered about one thousand years ago. He discovered that just looking isn't enough. Tundale was a young Irish knight who had an 'out of body' experience and went to hell with his guardian angel in order to see what lay in store for him unless he reformed his life. But Tundale soon found that to get the full benefit of the journey he had to experience the torments of hell for himself. Standing and watching other people suffer wouldn't help him at all. He had to know what it was like to be burned, frozen, beaten, chopped to pieces, famished and devoured. He had to stop being a spectator and take the plunge! Thank goodness he did. Whatever it did for his soul, it helps to make this wonderful account of his hellish journey so horrifyingly entertaining!
Some years ago the youth justice system in the UK tried to shock young offenders into reforming their lives by giving them an experience of what life in prison was really like. They were taken to visit adult prisons and allowed to meet and spend time with the inmates and to see the regimes there. The hope was that by seeing how unpleasant prison life was and how intimidating some of the inmates were, they might be so scared they would think again about committing crimes or causing trouble. Recently I heard on the radio that research has shown that these visits have proved to be largely ineffectual and the program is to be wound down. But whether it was successful or not it certainly wasn't a new idea when it was introduced. About 1000 years ago a young Irish knight who had seriously 'gone of the rails' wrote an account of just such a visit. Just as in the modern schemes he was shown the punishment that awaited him if he didn't reform, in the hope that he would be so terrified he would be shaken out of his wicked ways and change his life. But it wasn't a prison he was taken to, it was hell itself. He was shown and experienced the tortures of the damned and felt (and smelt) their pain! Unlike the more recent schemes this 'scheme' worked and he came back to this world a reformed character. Here and in subsequent posts I want to try to describe this vision of the tortures of hell and trace some of the influences it had in later versions of hell and paradise, in literature and in art.
When I first went to the National Gallery to visit the Visions of Paradise exhibition I asked the guard at the door the best way to find the exhibition (I get lost easily!) He kindly gave me directions and then added with a smile "you can't miss it". And he was rightI The brilliant light of the picture grabs your attention the moment you are within view. You can't take your eyes away from it. The painting is massive and its light is intense, startling, breathtaking. Botticini knew what most of us over the age of 50 already now only too well, that to see you need light! (I find it's impossible for me to read now unless I have a powerful lamp shining directly onto the page in front of me). And his picture is full of light; it's almost like a bright lamp itself, shining brilliantly in the corner of our room/galley/chapel, helping us to see! Not words on a page of course, but the divine reality. In the last post I talked about the lower panel of the painting, with its focus on the sponsors, Matteo Palmieri and his wife Niccolosa. In one sense the painting is really about them and I discussed the ways in which their position on the mountain top represents their claim to have been virtuous patrons, not just of Botticini and this painting, but of Florence. But the first thing you look at when you see the painting, as the guard pointed out to me, is not the two pious, kneeling figures in the centre, but the glorious dome of heaven above and its spectacular brilliance. In this post I want to talk about how understanding the importance of light in this picture helps us to grasp the spiritual and theological purpose of the painting! So, how do you imagine heaven? Green meadows? Rolling hills? Golden cities? Cloudy vistas? I imagine we all have our own personal vision of what heaven might be like, but I doubt if anyone reading this would have gone for the 'alien mothership' vision employed by Francesco Botticini in his masterpiece The Assumption of the Virgin into Heaven now on display as part of an exhibition in the National Gallery in London. Like a great otherworldly vessel, the huge resplendent 'dome' appears to hover over the earth, its insides open to view from below. Inside we can see row upon row of 'superior beings' sat in an ordered hierarchy of importance watching the action in the centre - a human being is physically being lifted up (on what appears to be a magic carpet) to the apex of the structure where she is greeted by the 'supreme being' (seated but also seated on a magic carpet). The human being of course is Mary the mother of Jesus and it is the risen and exalted Jesus himself who greets her. This is no medieval representation of alien abductions or a foretelling of the invention of hover boards, but rather a vision of heaven, heaven as the destination of the righteous and the home of God and the angels, but a heaven which is a truly 'alien' physical space just beyond the stars. Colourful, magisterial, bizarre, and, in the views of some of that era, heretical, this painting (also known as the Palmieri Altarpiece) is one of the strangest and most imaginative depictions of heaven ever attempted in art. In this and the following posts I want to explore this wonderful painting in some detail especially looking at the ideas about heaven and paradise that might have influenced Botticini. When people talk about being in the 'seventh heaven' they mean they are as happy as they can possibly be. But where did the notion that there are seven heavens come from? What does the seventh heaven contain that should make us so happy and what are the other six like? Sadly there is no one definitive source book we can turn to to explain this but there are some ancient writings from the Jewish-Christian tradition that reveal that during the first century A.D. (if not earlier) some people believed that there were multiple levels of heaven. In the pseudepigraphal writing known as Slavonic Enoch (or 2 Enoch), the writer describes the ascension of Enoch to the throne of God in heaven but in his version, (unlike that of the Book of the Watchers discussed in the previous post), Enoch ascends through seven heavens to find God. Each heaven has its own distinct identity, purpose and occupants. Like the apostle Paul, the writer locates paradise, i.e the garden of Eden, in the third heaven. Alongside paradise, on the same level, there is a place of terrible punishment reserved for the wicked, and staffed by specially prepared 'torture angels'. On other levels Enoch sees the workings of the cosmos, the legions of weeping angels (long before Dr Who was ever thought of) and the gates and galleries where the weather is stored. His may not have been the first account of multiple heavens but the author(s) of Slavonic Enoch provides a fascinating insight into how some Jews and Christians imagined heaven in the first centuries of the Common Era. "At last Enoch arrives in the seventh heaven and sees God. God, of course, is seated on his throne and attended by a vast number of angelic beings, the divine council or court. It seems that their chief job is to come forward in designated ranks and orders to bow before God. This is an image of God as supreme potentate, the imperial ruler, receiving obeisance from the subject kings and potentates. The heavenly beings here represent the 'powers and principalities' who govern the affairs of the cosmos. These are the forces that shape human destiny. What Enoch sees is that they bow before the authority of the Almighty. Enoch reports that they do so 'in joy and merriment'. There is laughter in heaven!"
The introduction to the 1960s American TV series Star Trek announced every week that captain Kirk and his crew were journeying to places "where no man had gone before". Rather disappointingly (to me as a young boy) the Enterprise usually found itself locked in battle with all too familiar aliens or visiting far-flung human outposts. But over 2000 years ago, an ancient Jewish writing known as The Book of the Watchers, described a remarkable 'otherworldly' journey by the legendary biblical hero Enoch, to a place where truly no man (or woman) had ever "gone before" - to heaven, the dwelling place of God. According to the Hebrew Bible, heaven, the home of God, is not normally accessible to human beings. But Enoch was an exception. An suggestive verse in the book of Genesis stated that Enoch, after three hundred and sixty five years of life, had been 'taken' by God. Assuming that Enoch, instead of dying, had been 'taken up' into heaven by God, the writer of The Book of the Watchers describes Enoch's ascension into heaven. In this, perhaps the earliest written account of a journey into heaven, heaven is described as a terrifying place of extremes, of lightening and hail stones, of fire and ice, in other words, a place totally inhospitable to human life and totally alien to human experience. This is God's home, not the home of human beings. "Strangely (we might think) that house in heaven inspired dread rather than joy. There is no "delight of life" there. This is not a warm and welcoming vision, and there is nothing here of the self indulgent, wish-fulfillment that defines so much of modern day speculation on heaven! Like all prophets before him who see or encounter the divine, Enoch falls on his face. It's strangeness and 'otherness' overwhelm him This is an acknowledgment that no human eyes should ever behold this place, the divine habitation. The home of God was never intended for human eyes."
What does God do? It might sound a strange question to ask, after all God is simply God. The good theological answer is probably just to say that God simply is (we can think of the Lord's reply "I am who I am" to Moses at the burning bush!). But throughout the Hebrew Bible there is another very clear answer - God rules, i.e. God is king, ruling over the cosmos, the creation. And because heaven is God's home, heaven is imagined in the Hebrew Bible as a divine, cosmic throne room. In accounts of visions of God, God is almost always shown seated on a throne, surrounded by angelic beings who represent the powers and forces that govern the cosmos. Heaven is the kingdom of God, the place where God's rule is absolute and unquestioned. In contrast to the earth where so often sin and rebellion defy the purpose of God, in heaven God's will is done. That's why Jesus taught his disciples to pray"thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth, as it is in heaven." In this post I discuss these visions of God in the Hebrew Bible and try to show that rather than being the eternal destination of the righteous, heaven was seen as a real, functioning work space where the real (i.e. hidden) business of the cosmos was being conducted. "The throne was a reminder that God ruled, that God was ultimately sovereign that the universe did not behave in a random way nor that the heavenly forces (the 'powers and principalities') were allowed to run free. The idea of the heavenly court elaborated that, with the added benefit that the thought of all angelic beings belonging to the divine court/council (even such dubious characters as the Satan and the lying Spirit), meant that they too fell under God's authority and control. In other words nothing bad could happen in the cosmos without the authorization of God. Now that might not bring much comfort to Job when he is devastated by his sufferings or to the friends and family of king Ahab when he dies in battle, but for the faithful community, who were usually on the wrong side of the power dynamics in ancient Israel, the thought that God was a king like, but much bigger and more powerful than the kings and rulers they knew, could be a powerful, even revolutionary idea."
The Hours of Catherine of Cleves: Imagining hell and purgatory in Catherine's prayer book6/16/2015 Hell as a place of torment and punishment is fundamentally an horrific concept. And yet for centuries the idea has fascinated generations of believers and non-believers alike. In different ways, through literature, art and film, people have tried to depict what a place such as hell might look like and to imagine the fearsome creatures who might administer punishment in such a place. Just us we, in a more secular age, are still fascinated by monsters, aliens and mass murderers, so in the medieval era people were fascinated by the monsters from the 'other side' - the demons and terrible creatures who, they believed, populated hell. And surely the most brilliant visual depictions of the terrifying and fascinating creatures of hell were created by the unknown artist responsible for the illustrations in the Book of Hours of Catherine Cleves. In his illustration of hell's castle he (presumably a he . . . but who knows?) created a bestiary of weird and wonderful demons and devils of wit, invention and imagination unrivalled in medieval art. In his illustrations of hell and purgatory, he not only horrifies but manages to delight and amuse the viewer too. Those who first read the book would have been duly horrified and frightened by the depictions of the tortures in hell and the agony of purgatory but I am sure that like us they would also have closed the book with a knowing smile on their faces too. Whoever he (or she) was, the illustrator was having great fun! "But the point of the Hours of the dead was to pray for those who languished, not in hell (it was too late for them), but in purgatory. The belief in purgatory (which I will come to - I promise) had by this time become the main focal point of the church's teaching on the afterlife. Most people who died were thought to have gone to purgatory. Few were considered good enough to go straight to heaven, and similarly not many were considered bad enough to be consigned to the castle of hell for eternity without any chance of remission! So the great majority went to purgatory where through the torments and suffering they experienced there were purged of their sin until they were ready to be led to heaven. The more the living prayed for those in purgatory the shorter the time they stayed (potentially thousands of years)."
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Archives
April 2016
GalleryThis blog is as much about images as it is about text. Below is a slideshow of the pictures and images used in this blog. Click on any of the pictures to go to the post where that image is featured.
PostsLocating Paradise #1 In a Garden, Far, Far Away
The Testament of Abraham and the Threefold Judgement of God #5 'Stuck in the Middle With You'
The Resurrection According to Rahner
Today You Will Be With Me in Paradise
The Testament of Abraham and the Threefold Judgement of God #4 'And Who by Fire'
The Testament of Abraham and the Threefold Judgement of God #3: Held in the Balance
The Testament of Abraham and the Threefold Judgement of God #2: Once, Twice, Three Times a Sinner
The Testament of Abraham and the Threefold Judgement of God #1: The Broad and Narrow Gates
Daily Dante 7: Many Rivers to Cross
Daily Dante 6: 'You Gotta Serve Somebody'
In Hell Everyone Can Hear You Scream. The Vision of Tundale #3
Teeth, Spikes and Cleavers: At the Sharp end of Hell. The Vision of Tundale #2
'No Pain No Gain': The Vision of Tundale #1
'Hellzapoppin':
Illustrations from Le Livre de la Vigne nostre Seigneur, #2 'It's The End of the World as We Know It (and we feel fine)'. Illustrations from Le Livre de la Vigne nostre Seigneur, #1
Visions of Heaven. Botticini's Assumption of the Virgin #2 Blinded by the Light
Visions of Heaven. Botticini's Assumption of the Virgin #1: Glorious and Immortal
Daily Dante 5: What the gates said.
Daily Dante 4: When I find myself in times of trouble
Daily Dante 3: I'll take you there
Daily Dante 2: Fierce creatures
Daily Dante 1: If you go down to the woods today
In Seventh Heaven or 'What Enoch Did Next'
A World of Fire and Ice: Heaven according to Enoch
The Power and the Glory: Visions of God as king in the Hebrew bible
The Beautiful Bestiary of Catherine Cleves: Monsters and Demons in detail.
Heaven is for Real: Heaven as a physical space up above the sky
Resurrecting the Dead or Reviving the Flowers? The loss of resurrection faith in Judaism.
The Defeat of Death #1: The promise of resurrection in the Isaiah Apocalypse.
The Defeat of Death #2: Death as a hostile power and promise of God's victory in Isaiah
Scary Monsters and Super Creeps: The 'Last Judgement' according to Stefan Lochner
Hell in the Hospital: The 'Last Judgement' of Rogier van der Weyden in the Beaune altarpiece.
'Hell' in the New Testament #2: The gates of Hades shall not prevail
The Hours of Catherine Cleves: Imagining hell and purgatory in Catherine's prayer book
'On Earth as in Heaven': The kingdom of God as a revelation of heaven
'Hell' in the New Testament #1: Gehenna
Lost in Translation #1: How the King James version got it so wrong about hell
Heaven is not our home
Domes, Depths and Demons: The cosmology of the Hebrew world
A Bigger God
"See you in Sheol" - Sheol, the common destination of all
Heaven, Hell and Christian Hope
BooksBelow are some of the books which have helped me the most in the research and writing for this blog. Click on any image to find out more about that book at its page on Amazon uk.
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