Some of the most remarkable, wonderful and unsettling images of hell and damnation from the middle ages are found in a 15th century manual describing the apocalypse (the end of the world) produced by Carthusian monks in France known as Le Livre de la Vigne nostre Seigneur (The Book of the Vineyard of our Lord). Now held by the Bodleian LIbrary in Oxford its illustrations and are available to view here. This seems to have been the second volume of a larger, two part work, completed some time before 1463 in France. Its author and illustrators are unknown. It's thought to be Carthusian because one illustration depicts two Carthusian monks. These images depict the Antichrist and his war on the Church, the signs of the coming of the end of the world, the Last Judgement and then, in full gory detail, the sufferings of the damned. (I should point out the book also pictures the saints in paradise but these are really boring by comparison!) The whole point of this blog is to argue that our ideas of heaven and hell owe far more to the imaginations of writers and artists in the middle ages and Renaissance than to the bible and here we get a really good feel for the kinds of ideas that were shaping the thinking of Christians bout the afterlife at this time. They are fun, shocking, amusing and very, very interesting.
2 Comments
The Hours of Catherine Cleves is one of the most beautiful illustrated medieval books ever produced. The illustrations of hell and purgatory are revealing, showing how these 'places' were imagined in the 15th century. The illustrations would have had a very serious purpose in warning the reader about the fate of the ungodly. But the real joy of these illustrations is seeing how much fun the illustrator had depicting the terrible tortures of hell and the wonderful, demonic monsters responsible for them. I have captured some of the detailed images from the picture of hell in the book and put them in the slideshow below for your enjoyment! These are images of the most amazing imagination. Almost every demon is different, and they all horrify in their different ways. I don't believe that a place like this exists but if there is a place of torment and punishment in the 'next life' I really do hope it's populated by characters such as these. It would make the afterlife so much more interesting!
Hello and welcome to the first post of the new blog. The subject of this blog is heaven and hell, and my focus is on how the biblical picture of the afterlife has been shaped by the various cultures in which the christian tradition has developed. Ideas such as 'going to heaven when we die', the existence of a domain of evil (hell) lorded over by Satan and his demonic horde, and the belief that the wicked will be punished after death in such a place, are not found in the bible. And yet these beliefs hold a strong place, not only in the in the beliefs of millions of christians but also in our popular culture. In this blog I want to explore how these unbiblical ideas became part of the fabric of christian reality. I am fascinated by the ways in which the early 'tours' of heaven and hell, medieval art and literature and a modern day pietistic individualism have shaped our Christian hope so that it becomes 'all about me' and my immediate post-mortem future, rather than about God, the creation which God made and loves, and the promise, clearly expressed in the Hebrew bible and the New Testament, that God's future involves the recreation of the heavens and the earth and the resurrection of the righteous to fill and inhabit that newly renovated creation. At the heart of my concern is that the resurrection of Jesus has become less and less central to the Christian hope. If my hope is simply to 'go to heaven when I die' then Jesus needn't have risen from the dead. But he did rise, and that fact stands as the central point of human (indeed cosmic) history. And it does so precisely because the resurrection of Jesus is the revelation in the present of God's promised future. The Resurrection is not just some interesting miracle that God performed for Jesus, but rather, in the resurrection of Jesus we see the beginning of the fulfillment of God's promise of redemption for the whole of creation. So, this blog is about the afterlife, but actually it is much more about the Christian hope and about how that hope is focused on the risen Lord of life Jesus Christ. I am not writing this just because I want to knock a view of heaven and hell with which I disagree but because I am passionate about the centrality of the resurrection of Jesus for our life in the church and for the life of the world, the creation. I invite you to read to share and to comment.
|
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.
Categories
All
|