Birgitta

Fr dear Fr: Is there a way forward to looking at the issue of individual judgement of the soul, and are we viewing things correctly in seeing it all as a personal vindication of the individual’s strengths and skills and talents, as so many parish sermons from the very average Red Wall parish clergy up here often relate?

Spiritual direction is for the few it must be said, but sometimes lawyers are asked to comment on the forensic or judicial side of Christian Art and Christian Theology of the end times kind. Forensic here means a tribunal involving a judge. It is true that up to the Dialogues of Birgitta of Sweden in the 1300s, most Christian Art depictions and paintings of the moment of judgement depicted simply the end of time collective judgement of the good and great and so on, and so rarely was the moment of individual judgement ever painted in any kind of detail, and this may have been because as a famous Cantab theologian once said, up to the 1300s, it was assumed that the Second Coming was the big moment and that this meant the General Vindication of the oppressed flocks and the suppressed poor by the just Messiah, as Just Judge of the Living, and also as General Vindex Pauperum or Vindicator of the flocks and the poor and the oppressed - these scenes were depicted as judgements in favour of the poor and against the rich and the powerful and the magistrates of long term corruption. So it was a general judgement event that was depicted. Naturally the Christians saw this moment as the vindication of their trials and strengths and skills. There was little time for anything more than this. Many parish sermons on the subject in the 1980s and 1990s tended to see it all as a Pelagian Fantasy moment in which the skills and talents and strengths of the Christians, laity first, are rewarded first and foremost by the Messiah. So it is with some surprise that we notice that the Dialogues of Birgitta are returning though despite all of the Pelagian Propaganda, and in this newer Birgittan schema it is the individual before his/her/their God that becomes the chief preoccupation. As Fr James of San Diego and Westport says it - Kierkegaard come back, all is forgiven. God is infinite spirit so he can judge many finite individuals at the same time. One of the mysteries of the next world. But Birgitta was a nice princess and yet even she was shocked at the judgement scenes she had to experience - not all of them went the way of the Pelagian Fantasy of the 1990s. 90s Man does not fare so well in her schemas. These are though revelations and not just artistic depictions arising from studies of the scriptures. The moment Birgitta enters Christian History though, Christian Art changes. Now it is the quaking individual before the Just Judge. As Alexander Armstrong of Classic FM says of the musical genius of Allegri’s Miserere, “such scenes and such music makes the hairs stand up on your neck.” As do the Dialogues. And indeed the Dialogues of Birgitta are not for the faint-hearted. Some robust constitution is needed. The local bishop of the reader above was so sickened and quakened by the new translation of the Dialogues that he refused permission to have them printed in the diocese up north in the Red Wall Dioceses, he even banned prayer cards for Birgitta. But she was a princess who looked after the poor, so she was robust. Anyway that is the simple answer to the reader’s question of faith - all of us have to be Justin Beliebers when it comes to such issues - it behoves us to be sober when reading such things.