2 THE APOCALYPTIC IDEA
New. If they glance at the roof, they see the creation of the world and the beginnings of history as taught in Scripture and tradition.
The pious worshipper will perhaps not care thus to look about him. But there is one thing which he cannot well help seeing. He
cannot raise his eyes to adore the consecrated Host without being confronted with the Last Judgement. Behind the Priest, behind the Altar, behind the lighted candles, behind the sacred drama of worship,
the Last Judgement is always there. The only thing that between the Christian worshipper and Hell is the Priest and the Altar.
The symbolism of the Last Judgement, as presented in Christian Churches, is not always exactly the same as in the Sistine Chapel. At Ulm, and formerly in many English Churches, it was represented on the Chancel Arch, so that the Altar was exhibited as the one open door through which the worshipper might take refuge, put however it might be figured, it stood in the centre of conviction, both in popular belief and in the official creed. The Pope's Chapel, for all the classical detail in the paintings, faithfully reflects the Christian scheme of things: behind everything the Last Judgement looms in the background, universal, inevitable.
The guide-books tell us that Michaelangelo's great picture owes a great deal to Dante. I have no doubt that this in true in the sense in which the statement is made, i.e., in the arrangement of details.
Nevertheless there is a sense in which Dante's poem marks the triumph of a quite different order of ideas, which robs the idea of the Last Judgement of most of its significance. Dante goes to the Other World, he sees the dead in Paradise, in Purgatory, or in Hell. For all intents and purposes the Last Judgement has no meaning for them they are judged already. After such and such a time or mode of probation one by one the souls in Purgatory will leave it to join the souls in Paradise, just as one by one they had arrived. The Other World is a place, which individuals enter one by one when they die; the conception of the Last Judgement, on the other hand, makes the Other World a time, an era, which all individuals experience simultaneously, a "Divine Event to which all Nature moves". It is this Divine Event that is set forth by the Apocalypses. The doctrine of the Apocalypses is the doctrine of the Last Judgement.
For the study of Early Christianity it is most important to keep in mind the distinction between the doctrine of a Last Judgement and other forms of belief in retributive justice and in life beyond the grave. This is particularly the case when it comes to a question
