Damnation

This work speaks about the damnation in Martin Luther‟s view. Inside this topic resides the aspects of the temporal and eternal punishments. This, indeed, will be discussed inside three doctrines: sin, grace, and faith. The focus resides over the theology of the “young” Luther, namely, before he had the “experience of the tower” that would change all his “theology of the Cross”. Also is viewed who exercise this punishments and so how Luther see the way to fly of the damnation. To understand the theology of the “young” Luther will be made a lecture in his notes on the works of Peter Lombard and Augustine, so on in his first lectures on the Psalms. About the “mature” Luther will be made a summary of his writings present in the Book of Concord (Catechisms and Smalcald Articles) and in his Lectures on Romans and Psalms, this after he pass through the “experience of the tower”.

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Lothario dei Segni (1160-1216), a theologically trained Italian scholar of royal heritage who later became the most significant pope of the Middle Ages, here presents, relentlessly and passionately, a distinctly platonic work he composed at leisure with the goals illustrating (1) the “miserable entrance” (2) the “guilty progress” and (3) the “damnable exit” upon, through, and from the human condition. This text has never been forgotten and will, no doubt, survive until the End Times that it chillingly describes. (There is a new URL [https://www.academia.edu/36536128/The_Spirit_of_War] for the fundamental paper, mentioned in the end notes, on the masters of greed, pride, and vanity.)

This translation in vigorous, broad, and systematic strokes shows nonetheless a deeply nuanced understanding of the real life of men and women as it always has been and ever will be until the distinctive Judgment and End for which it is destined. Memorable traces of humor, sangfroid, irony, satire, and pointed rage punctuate the text as summarized here for the modern reader. The writing is a model of organization, wit, and compassion all in one. Readers are advised that a new writing on this page ('The Last Day') repeatedly cites Innocent III and specifically discusses his views on the Last Judgment.

In modern terms, it could be said that the true cause of large-scale non-organic mental distress is the coeval--the neighbor--of the shattered psyche. The sober-minded Hegel (d. 1831) put it another way: THE MAJORITY WILL ALWAYS BE WICKED. Hence, if the majority of all people are behaving either as psychopaths or crypto-psychopaths (willfully immoral rather than congenitally so), then the remaining persons (a plurality) are being subjected not to social inequality (as liberals say) but, rather, to unjust persecution. We are, of course, born unequal with disparate talents and possibilities.

This tends toward being a law-enforcement problem, not a matter of political economy as the deluded materialist and atheist Marx thought, except that the laws are concocted, adjusted, and enforced through MAJORITY RULE (worship of the ballot box), yielding mass futility de jure and in fact---a self-vitiating regime of horror and injustice ("grab-game alley," in Carlyle's trenchant judgment) that leads to forms of mass insanity, neurosis, and epidemics of suicide. This is what Innocent III was describing, which makes him a fairly sane observer of human affairs. (Note: Fair Use and Quotation freely granted to world scholarship.)

(from the Introduction)
Intending only to research medieval conceptions of hell, author Alan Bernstein wanted to investigate postmortem retribution in the ancient world for historical context. This investigation turned into an entire book of its own. In The Formation of Hell, Bernstein seeks to explain how the idea of hell achieved a prominent place in people’s minds. He explicitly states that he intends to accomplish this without any prior concern for whether hell actually exists or any preceding judgement as to the nature or value of hell.  In the end, Bernstein provides a superb example of historical investigation and rigorous scholarship. Though there are certain theological and metaphysical implications omitted from the book, the author successfully demonstrates that the notion of hell originally arose late in Judaism out of a need to explain the injustices in the world and became a rhetorical device designed to elicit conformity to religious and cultural mores.

Le Traité des Quatre dernières choses est la traduction française, réalisée par Jean Miélot, certainement à la demande du duc de Bourgogne Philippe le Bon, d’un texte latin intitulé Cordiale Quatuor Novissimis. La mise en images du traité en français a été commandée à trois artistes distincts : Jean Le Tavernier, Le Maître aux grisailles fleurdelisées et Loyset Liédet. Ils ont chacun enluminé un manuscrit. Les formations, les styles et les goûts de ces artistes se distinguent et se traduisent dans leur art. À travers l’analyse des enluminures de ces trois manuscrits, ce mémoire prétend étudier la relation texte-image et montrer que trois artistes travaillant à une même période au sein de la même cour ont réalisé des œuvres singulières. Les enluminures qu’ils ont peintes constituent certes la mise en images du texte, mais traduisent également la pensée de l’époque sur la mort et l’au-delà. Les images et les discours visuels employés ont parfait le Traité servant ainsi de moyen d’édification spirituelle et de guide aux lecteurs dans leurs médiations et prières personnelles.

Contemporary theological reflections on depictions of hell in medieval literature have been dominated by modern concerns with theodicy and the freedom of the individual.  In this presentation, I will use the insights of Alejandro García-Rivera and John de Gruchy to pave the way for a socio-political retrieval of medieval visions of hell for use in theology.  In opposition to thinkers such as von Balthasar, who make no allowance for constructive uses of literary hells in Christian theology, I argue that by distinguishing literary visions of hell from ontological and metaphysical assertions about damnation, theologians are freed from overly literal interpretations of hell and can understand constructions of hell primarily as attempts to promote social virtue on earth rather than anticipate personal vengeance in the afterlife.  Medieval writers such as the author of the Vision of Adomnán, Dante, Langland, and Chaucer use hell as a “counter-aesthetics” by which they place the injustices of their societies within a theological context in which sins are named, denounced, and rejected in favor of virtuous societies.  The author of the Vision’s denunciation of the alienation of church property, Dante’s condemnation of the excesses of the Florentine bankers, and Chaucer’s excoriation of mendicant greed, are properly understood not as the settling of personal vendettas but as attempts to shape moral behavior.  Insisting on the necessary distinction between literature and theology, and looking beyond aestheticism’s identification of theological aesthetics with beauty, contemporary theologians can understand how the encounter with the ugliness of hell in medieval literature may enable a positive agenda of moral and social transformation.