Medieval Christianity and the Final Judgement: A Mini-Essay

      As Philippe Ariès explains in his landmark history on death, Christian views of the final reckoning underwent a major shift during the medieval period. Before to the twelfth century, the resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ to the throne of Heaven, which is detailed in Book of Revelation, dominated the artistic depictions and priestly sermons on the end of times; however, commencing in the twelfth century, the serene ascent marked by flowers and a rainbow was supplanted by a grim apocalypse, inspired by the Gospel According to Saint Matthew, which detailed the revival of the dead, unyielding acts of judgement, and the separation of the moral – sent to Heaven – from the unjust – banished to Hell.[1] Indeed, this bleakly powerful concept of the Last Judgement and its rapture, Ariès explains, extended beyond medieval society into the religious art and homilies of subsequent generations, from the sixteenth-century paintings of Jan Hieronymus Bosch [depicted above] to the seventeenth-century architecture of the Chiesa Nuova in Assisi.[2]

Works Referenced

Ariès, Philippe. The Hour of Our Death: The Classic History of Western Attitudes Toward Death Over the Last One Thousand Years. 1977. Trans. Helen Weaver. New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 2000.

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[1] Ariès, 97-106.
[2] Ariès, 106-110.